Blood Sisters
by KharBevNor
Summary: Integra takes the curse of eternal life to ensure the survival of Hellsing. A Hellsing fanfic cliche with a twist. IxS. Yuri. Semi-explicit lemon.
1. The Price of Fear

Sir Integra Wingates Hellsing banged the stack of papers together violently, then dumped them forcefully in her out tray. Finally! The reports of the previous night had been checked over and written up, signed and were ready to be archived.

Just in time for the next round of missions to start.

She stood, stretching herself as she turned to look at the russet sky spread out above the tree-line that dominated her office window. She would go out on the missions tonight, she decided. She needed some fresh air. She had been cooped up all last week while her ghastly husbands ghastly relatives had been over. Gah! The stupidity of the man. Inviting civilians here, to the Hellsing mansion. This wasn't just some place where you could invite aunties and cousins willy-nilly, as she had tried to explain to the fool. It had been a nightmare, trying to somehow create some impression of a normal household fit for visitors out of a building less than three miles from the live in quarters of over a hundred troops, with vast cellars that contained torture facilities, a black magic laboratory and the living quarters of two vampires. Goodness knows what state secrets the moron had babbled away. At least young Arthur had more sense, keeping polite and quiet and saying he didn't know anything of 'Mum and dad's work' even though he had regular lessons on the supernatural and his future duties, in addition to his daily attendance at an exclusive private school fourteen miles away. He would be a credit to the family name, she knew. Quiet, taciturn, resourceful, a proud little warrior, with his mothers blonde hair and steely eyes, and his fathers strong chin, one of the man's few good features. She had scarcely believed her ears when the order came, but it had carried the signatures of both her Majesty and the Prime Minister. She must marry, and she must marry the Earl of Huntingdon, and she must produce an heir. Oh, but why him?

She chided herself. She knew why, it was a perfectly logical choice. The man was of noble birth, young, unmarried, an upstanding protestant, his family was not inbred and he was immensely loyal to the crown. Pity that he was such a pathetic idiot. Not only pathetic, but power hungry as well. He was constantly trying to snatch little titbits of authority. 'Can I help you with your paperwork, Integra dear?', 'Why don't I do that whilst you spend some time with Arthur?', 'You look like you could use a rest, maybe I could finish those reports.' Bah! Callously disguised attempts to become something more approaching Hellsing's deputy leader. How did the dotard think he could take that kind of responsibility? He had only ten years of knowledge in the lore and arcana of the living dead and their disposal, whilst she had a life-time of experience and learning no-one but one raised from birth for the post could hope to have. Their son would lead Hellsing when she retired or died, not him. The pathetic fool couldn't even muster Seras' respect, yet alone Alucard's, and without at least the grudging respect of Hellsing's two vampires you were lost as a leader.

She opened her desk draw and took out a box of cigars, biting the end of one and beginning to chew on it. Damn the royal prerogative. Damn the strictures placed on the selection of her husband. Would it have hurt to marry a commoner, or an atheist? Yes. It would. She told herself, as she hooked her jacket off the back of the chair and donned it. It would put an unstable moral influence on the child. The leader of Hellsing must be the paragon of a noble religious knight. Inheritance is a huge part of that.

She locked the office door behind her, and stalked off down the corridor, the cigar still clenched between her teeth. She wouldn't light it. She couldn't, she had no lighter or matches. She had given up on doctor's orders during her pregnancy, and never started again, but she still had to do something with her hands and her mouth, something to calm her down. Smoking had started as a rebellion, one way she could express herself in her strictured life, that and a book of quite terrible angsty poems that she now kept locked in her desk draw, under a pile of papers where neither Alucard or her husband would find it, since it would become rather embarrassing were either of them ever to read them.

She smiled slightly as she turned down the main stairs to the ops room on the first floor. Walter was waiting for her there, at his desk where he handled incoming information from the Police and the M15. He was well over seventy now, but still showed no signs of slowing down.

"Ah, Sir Integra. Something coming in right now."

She frowned.

"Already Walter? The sun's hardly down yet."

"It's these third generation newtypes, those bitten by the fledglings of the first FREAKS. They have few of the classical abilities of the vampire, apart from strength, speed and immortality, but their weaknesses are also less pronounced. Intelligence we have gathered from incidents in Ireland involving Section 13 indicate that some have even become immune to holy water."

Integra smiled "I'd have liked to have seen the expression on Father Lieberwitz's face when he discovered _that_. I'd imagine he had a fair bit of regenerating to do."

"Indeed sir Integra. The incident we have at the moment is fairly typical. A bank robbery with supernatural complications. We have at least two FREAKS, an unknown number of ghouls and at least twenty human hostages. They're demanding safe conduct, or they kill one hostage every thirty minutes."

Integra snarled.

"We go as soon as possible."

"We, sir Integra?"

"I can't stand to be cooped up in this mansion one moment longer, Walter. I'll come along only to watch, as normal. We'll take Seras, I think, and the second platoon. Keep Alucard and the first platoon on standby in case anything else comes up. Now, lets move out."

"Shall I get your gun, sir Integra?" he asked her, as he dialled the internal code to the troops waiting area. She no longer carried it at all times, because of Arthur. Were there to be an accident with the now quite aging Beretta, she would never forgive herself.

She pondered for a moment. "No, I won't need it. I'm only going to observe after all." Senseless to carry the thing around with her if she didn't need it. Knowing her she'd probably leave it in her clothes or on her bedside table, and then all these years of not carrying it could be undone in a minute by a nine year-olds deadly curiosity.

"Right you are, sir Integra. I'll phone down for your chauffeur once I call the troops up."

"Alright ladies and gentlemen, listen up. This is going to be a clean sweep mission. We have no way of knowing exact dispositions of the enemy inside, smoked glass and the lights are out, but we know that we are looking at _at__ least_ two vampires and ten ghouls. As always, expect more. There may be hostages. As always, termination of the FREAKS is a higher priority than saving the hostages, but don't go out of your way to kill them. If you see a bite mark, put a bullet in their skull. No exceptions. Private Blake, you will cover the front entrance from that roof. Privates Gardner and Langdon will cover the back entrance at street level with their machine guns. Fire team A and I will enter from the front, fire team B from the back, fire team C will go in the roof. Room to room with flashbangs, gas and mp5's. You do not have clearance to use fragmentation grenades in this building, it's not built strongly enough to take them. Right, does everyone know what they're doing?"

Seras lowered her thin red-tinted spectacles and looked at the troops with crimson eyes. There were some nervous fidgets. Seras was still quite a sweet natured person, even after sixteen years as a vampire, but she still commanded a good deal of fear and respect. None of the men or women who looked back at her from behind their armoured face-masks had not seen her tear someone limb from limb or something similar.

"Yes? Good. Get into your positions, we move out in two."

She strode around the edge of the APC behind fire team A, withdrawing her weapons from her long brown raincoat. The Jezebel gleamed in the light of the street-lamps, gold and ivory shining back from its obscenely long barrel and slide. She had pestered Walter to give her a weapon suitable for fighting in close quarters for ages, but it had been worth it. The equal of Alucard's jackal, but of a more rounded design, firing slightly smaller 11mm quicksilver bullets from an extended magazine to give her thirteen shots in each reload. She thumbed off the safety, and grasped it in her right hand, reading the words on its side.

_Fear is the mindkiller._

She smiled. Yes, fear was her only enemy, it had always been fear. She had hid in the church through fear, accepted Alucard's offer of immortality through fear…well, maybe some things were good. As much as she despised admitting it, she was really starting to enjoy being a vampire. There were places to go, interesting things to kill, blood to drink. She supposed drinking Alucard's blood must have been responsible in part for the change in her attitude…she was a No Life Queen now, no longer cowered under his will or violated by the constant presence of his mind. She was nowhere near equal with him, she couldn't even manifest her beast yet, but she at least now felt that she had earned some respect for the being who looked to be the only stable presence in her unlife for the foreseeable future.

She put her left hand into the coat and brought out her trusty Socom, also filled with silver bullets, and a lot less overkill for putting down those that had been bitten. She grimaced. She hoped there wouldn't be too much of that.

She grabbed a walky-talky "Teams, sound off."

"Private Blake, in position."

"Privates Gardner and Langdon in position"

"Lieutenant Grey, in position"

"Lieutenant Hills, in position"

"Right…GO! GO! GO!"

A few bursts of gunfire took down the front doors, and the first flashbangs sailed through, followed quickly by the Hellsing troops. Suddenly, something skittered back through the broken glass

BANG. Seras shielded her eyes just in time. Bright lights were sheer pain for a vampire, the main reason they hated the sun. Fire team A was not so lucky, they were looking directly at the thing when it went off, and their nightvision goggles were down. She heard more than one scream as they were blinded by the flash.

She felt the presence move by her, and fired with her Socom as she opened her eyes. Turning, she followed up with two bullets from the Jezebel, which slammed into the side door of a parked car that the fleeing vampire had leapt over. She fired off the rest of the rounds from her Socom at it as it ran between two APC's, one hitting it in the arm with little effect.

Dammit, they're even becoming more resilient to silver! Cursed FREAKs.

The FREAK ripped through a pair of Hellsing soldiers, tossing them away like ragdolls as it ran on, and gave chase, legs pounding on concrete before she leapt, inhuman strength propelling her onto the top of the APC, where she saw the horrible sight.

Sir Integra, stood in front of the FREAK, and said the Hellsing prayer, even as she reached for her gun…

That wasn't there. She hadn't brought it.

"Shall be banished…." She faltered.

The FREAK snarled and drew a combat knife. With one quick move he stabbed her in the chest, then back, and in the stomach, and back, as he raised his arm for the killing blow, all in less than half a second.

Seras finally overcame her shock and fired, one of the Jezebels rounds tearing the FREAKs knife arm clean from his body. He turned, his face a mixture of anger, surprise and fear.

"Into eternal damnation" finished Seras, ash she blew the monsters head to pieces. "Amen!" another round smashed through its chest, throwing the corpse away from Integra with the force of the blast, the shattered body becoming dust as it landed. She gave a sick little smile of satisfaction. Then she remembered in a flash.

"SIR INTEGRA!" she screamed as she leapt like a cat from the top of the APC, to a car roof which buckled under the impact and on down beside her fallen master. She grabbed the fallen knight, closing her mind to the sweet smell of noble blood with an iron will. A man in a white coat stood above her.

She looked at him imploringly, and he shook his head.

Seras face was dim and shadowy above her. She turned and saw the doctor, saw the quiet and hopeless shake. Of course. The blade had severed her aorta, even she knew that. She must have lost a pint of blood from her chest already, never mind the gut wound. By the time the paramedics got here and stopped her bleeding, she would already be dead.

No.

She couldn't die. Oh god, she couldn't die. She had never made the formal announcement of Arthur's succession. He was too young, younger even than she had been. A thirteen year-old ruling Hellsing had been bad enough. A nine year-old would be worse…but it wouldn't be him…oh Jesus, it wouldn't be him. It would be Julian, smug, idiotic, over-confident Julian. Even if Arthur were to take over, he would only be a puppet…No. Hellsing would crumble whilst she was forced to watch from the hereafter, powerless, impotent…No! No! _No_! It couldn't end like this, all this struggle, this toil. Her life and suffering wasted.

There was always…there was always the old escape. The old dream, the introverted teenagers fantasy, the depressed twenty-something's nightmare. But no! Curse her, Alucard was at the mansion. He was fast but not that fast. She could feel herself dying already, her noble blood seeping away…he couldn't come in time, even if she were to call…hah! She probably didn't even have the strength to call.

You idiot Integra, you fool. You forsake your firearm for some paranoid construction about your son accidentally shooting himself with it, and now you're dying, and he's going to have to watch as his father destroys the organisation, and you can't even take that dark path, with all its perils and complications because he's not _here!_

But… said a small part of her slowly fading mind…. But Seras is.

But you're no longer a virgin Integral…but wait, no that doesn't matter either, _Because__ Seras herself was female_. All she had to do was force enough of her own blood back through the wound. Yes, it would work, It had to, it must. If she died here, now , all was lost. Hellsing was lost, and with it would come either the destruction of Britain or the takeover of the Catholics, almost equally doom-laden prospects in Integra's mind. No, she must survive. Not for herself, not for selfish reasons but for her son, for Hellsing, for the crown. Her mind shuddered at the thought of being one of them, of coffins and blood, but she must accept it. It was her _duty_.

"Seras…bite me"

Seras looked down incredulously at the dying knight.

"What?"

"Bite me…make me a…vampire. I can't…die…here…"

"But…" But what? But everything! For all her civility to Seras, sir Integra hated vampires. It was ingrained into her, part of her upbringing, her heritage. The Hellsings were to be pure, noble, to slay vampires, protect the innocent and meet their just reward in heaven.

"Do…it. I command you." 

And that was an end to it. She tried to resist, but the seals etched into the back of her hands, which the gloves merely emulated, burned like fire, forcing her to obey her masters wishes. Fool Integra! Why did you insist on the binding ritual. Now I have to carry out your commands, without question or hesitation. Idiot. You don't know what you're asking, don't know what you will become, can't see the prospect of an eternity of nights stretching before you forever. Can't see what the bloodlust is like. The desire for the blood…the sweet…rich…flowing…blood…

And then, with a last nervous lick of her lips, Seras bit into Integra's throat.


	2. Becoming

Integra gasped as she felt Seras' fangs sink into her neck. Whatever she had thought it would feel like, this wasn't it. She had expected pain, or at least some sort of dull ache, but this felt…well, to put it bluntly, she could get used to this. It felt like getting a massage almost, a sort of pleasurable warm hum. She could feel the blood trickling down her skin from the puncture wounds, warm and wet, but it was like a nosebleed. No pain, no…

Then, Seras brought things to the second stage. Withdrawing her fangs for a moment, she bit her lower lip, causing two deep wounds which filled her mouth with her own vampiric blood. Then, she regurgitated some of Integra's blood, allowing the two to mix, before re-inserting her fangs into the wounds and injecting the mixture into Integra.

Integra's eyes widened. She thought she had felt pain. She had been shot, stabbed herself in the neck, damn near raped by an insane vampire at least twice, and numerous other things. Heck, she had just been stabbed within centimetres of her heart and in her gut with a serrated blade. But nothing she had ever felt before hurt so much as Seras' blood entering her veins. She screamed as it burnt through her like fire, flaying through taught muscle, etching down the pathways of her brain like splinters of ice being hammered into her skull. She gasped for air, blood bubbling from her wounds as her heart beat faster and faster. It spread down, along her left arm, across her chest and into her right arm. Her heart felt like a supernova going off in her chest, faster and faster. Her wounds were brilliant lances of pure pain. It reached her abdomen, and she clenched up as it burned through her most sensitive regions. On it crept, down her legs, into her toes, until her whole body was made of pain. Good lord! Shouldn't you black out when you're in this much pain? Her heart was beating faster, faster, every beat like a sledgehammer smashing into her ribs. She saw, through red misted eyes, Seras keeping the Paramedics at bay, a fierce look on her face, emphasised by the trickles of blood that fell from each corner of her mouth.

"No," she heard the vampires voice through a curtain of pain. "Don't go near her. She'll be hungry when she comes to." Then some more, something she couldn't catch. Oh God, this pain, this incessant drumming…

Then her heart stopped. No, she thought, it hasn't worked, I'm dead…

Is there still pain when I'm dead? Maybe I didn't truly believe, maybe this is hell…

No, hell did not have an asphalt floor. She was still alive, still on earth, still breathing…but her heart had stopped.

"My heart…" She said slowly.

Seras kneeled next to her, stroking her forehead.

"Quiet Integra, and, don't fight it. I fought it, and it hurt like hell."

"Fight what…" said Integra, as the pain slackened off into something far worse, an incredible itching, like an army of ants moving to and fro under her very skin. She convulsed, clawing at herself, trying to get rid of the itching. She felt Seras delicate but unbelievably strong hands firmly grasp her wrists, holding her to the floor. She cried out in frustration…this itching!

"I said, don't fight. It comes in the eyes and mouth first, I remember…"

Before she could ask what, she felt it. The itch became stronger, welling up behind her eyes and in her gums and tongue. She screwed up her face, closing her eyes, her jaw agape, gasping.

Seras kept her pinned to the floor, watching, with a confused mixture of horror, excitement, fascination and pity as a single tear of blood welled up in each eye and ran down her face. She smiled at a memory. Of how scared she'd been when she first cried as a vampire. She'd thought she was dying, the same thing she'd thought when she'd had her first period. That was before she had started drinking blood… fifteen years ago now.

So much could happen in fifteen years. They say everything happens in an instant, but think of all the instants in fifteen years…

Integra's eyes opened, and Seras could see the red slowly growing from the pupil, drowning the steely blue forever. She'd wished she could have seen that happen in her own eyes…now she could watch it in another's.

"Stings…" Groaned Integra, struggling feebly as Seras firmly pinned her to the ground, stopping her from clawing at her new, delicate eyes.

"You're not going to like the next bit then." Said Seras, smiling sadly.

Integra was about to ask what on earth the next bit was, but was cut off as she felt her jaw clench…what on earth?

Then, there was the impression that her canines had been hammered through her gums. She screamed, and she felt her tongue push up and through her teeth, longer than it should ever possibly be…she remembered Bubbancy's long, pointed demons tongue and she felt sick. Oh god, what had she done. She was becoming one of them, one of those monsters. What would her father think now, up in heaven…no. He would understand. This was for the good of the family, the good of Hellsing. She could not have left the organisation to collapse in the hands of an idiot and a child. Never!

Hah, how can this be good for Hellsing. To be ruled by a demon? You need your head examining, Integra…

Well, either way, it was too late now. She felt worrying movements inside her, innards shifting, presumably to cope with her new diet. Then the itching left her insides, migrated to the flesh, to the muscles and skin…she realised she was becoming slowly cold. Her breath was no longer misting the air. Oh god. She really was dead, she was a corpse, an infernal undead…oh God! This itching!

Seras actually felt Integra's strength increase as her muscles changed, her arms which had once so casually pinned the injured woman to the floor beginning to strain slightly against the monstrous strength now embodied in Sir Integra's limbs. It was almost complete now. Her flesh was paler, her eyes red, her tongue lengthened, her canines had become fangs. Her whole body was tensed now as the final surge of transformation took place. Seras watched in mute fascination as the innumerable wrinkles and worry lines that had appeared in Sir Integra's face over her time as the leader of the Hellsing institution disappeared. Her wounds, which had stopped leaking blood some time ago, began to close. She winced as the wounds sucked together, as if the flesh was pulled in to some central vacuum. Then, she gave a final convulsion, and was still. Seras released her arms, let the newly born vampire slowly bring her arms up to feel the smooth flesh where so recently there had been bloodied wounds, to trace the new and unfamiliar line of her teeth

She looked up at Seras, saw her blurry face, sitting there, what seemed to be a wistful smile on it…but it was hard to tell…damn, weren't vampires supposed to have incredible senses?

"I can't see well, Seras." She said, weakly. She felt cold all over, and so very, very hungry.

"That's because your glasses have come off, Integra." Said Seras…she wouldn't have been so intimate but…it felt wrong somehow, to call her fledgling by rank, to bow down to someone lower on the order of things…

Oh no, those feelings she had had about Alucard…Integra was feeling them now, about her.

Oh no…this was going to get complicated.

"I…still need glasses? But I thought…"

"You have superior distance and night vision…you just need your glasses to get it."

She retrieved the fallen knights glasses from where they lay, lying close to her. Miraculously, they had not chattered, though a crack ran through one lense..

She gently placed them on Integra's face.

"Thank you, master."

Okay Integra, what the hell did you just say? What the _hell_ did you say? You called her master, didn't you. You called the Police Girl your master!

Well…she is. She made me, she brought me back from death.

But you're her commanding officer damn it.

Seras had expected it. Yes, things were going to get complex.

"I didn't mean... I…"

Seras laid one finger on Integra's lips, and put her arm around her, drawing her up into a half sitting position, back propped on Seras knee.

"Where is it, dammit!?" asked Seras, turning to look at the Paramedics. One of them, the look and smell of fear plastered all over him, handed her a packet of transfusion blood.

"Thanks" she said, turning to her fledgling and leader, blood-soaked and shivering, lying pathetically in her arms.

"Here" she said, tearing the tab from the packet. "You lost a lot of blood. Drink this"

She looked at the blood packet with a look of utter revulsion.

"No, I can't…"

"Drink it!" Seras said in a stern tone.

"But…"

"Remember when I refused to drink, how you chided me for my refusal, my inability to accept my new self? Well, don't show the same weakness. Trust me, it will go easier. Besides, I doubt you could resist at the moment. Even I drank just after I'd been turned."

"Where did Alucard get the blood from…" she asked, in little more than a murmur. Such cold.

"He always has some stashed away for when he gets peckish. The rationing system is a petty human joke as far as he's concerned. Now, drink!"

"I…but…" Seras just held the blood packet closer to her face. Integra could smell it now…it smelled metallic, coppery, yet somehow rich, sweet…it smelled good. Unbelievably good, better than anything she'd ever smelt before…Seras brought the packet closer and closer. She reached up with her hand, intending to push it away… but instead, as she grasped it, she squeezed it, and an arc of crimson sprayed from the hole in the bag to her mouth.

Aha. So _that_ was how they could stand to drink blood. Her pupils dilated as she tasted it. It was better than anything she'd ever tasted before, a flavour finer than the finest champagne, and she wanted _more_…

Her mouth lashed forwards and her fangs met in the bag, dribbling blood down her chin and across her upper lip. She sucked greedily, slurping the carmine fluid down in just a few seconds. Then she leant back, gasping for air, as she felt the warmth flush through her body…

Damn, if this was what cold blood from a packet, laced with anticoagulation chemicals tasted like, imagine what warm blood from a human…

No. Don't. Never, _ever_, imagine that again.

She suddenly felt sympathy for Seras, for what she'd been going through all these years. So this was why they called vampirism a curse.

Oh shit, Integra, what have you let yourself in for?

Hunger.

"I want some more…" she said, slowly. "Please". She looked imploringly into Seras eyes.

Wow, thought Seras, reaching down to brush a strand of bloodied hair from Integra's eye, and I thought my personality changed fast. Good grief, Integra had hardly been a vampire for five minutes…but, of course her personality was different. She was not only a vampire, but a hungry fledgling vampire, and Seras was her master. She remembered how strong that feeling was, the master-servant relationship, the terrible weighty bond of love, respect and obedience that hurt so much when it was severed. She had, in the space of ten minutes, become everything to Integra: mother, older sister, nanny and teacher combined.

Bloody hell…I'm actually younger than her.

_But not now._ Vampirism was a rebirth. This was Integra's new birthday, and she was zero years old, nothing, whilst Seras had sixteen years of nights under her belt.

Seras smiled and nodded. Then she turned, her face hardening.

"Get me another packet." She growled at a medic. "Wait!" she said, as the man turned. "Just get it ready in the ambulance. Actually, get two, I gave her quite a bit of my blood. If possible, make sure one's B positive. Prepare the ambulance for one stretcher case, and for all that's good, keep those bloody troops away."

That was the number one concern now. She had to get Integra back to Hellsing without alerting the troops to her transformation. She had been injured, she was ill. That would cover the first few awkward weeks of adjustment.

She stood slowly, bringing Integra up with her. The blonde haired woman took one shuddering step and fell, only to be caught by Seras.

"Come on…I'll carry you."

"Thank you…"

She hauled Integra up, light as a feather, and lay her across her arms, just as Alucard had carried her from Cheddar. Integra groaned slightly and put her arms round Seras neck, causing Seras to hold her more closely as they walked to the Ambulance.

"What have I done, Seras?"


	3. Broken Home

The ambulance drove smoothly along the country roads towards the Hellsing manor. They had left ahead of the troops, to give Integra time to hide herself, to get somewhere out of sight where she could begin the torturous process of adjusting to her new life.

"Seras…"

"What, Integra?" The two of them sat alone in the back of the ambulance. Integra had drunk three more bags of medical blood before her hunger was quenched. Seras had helped herself to two as well. She hadn't realised quite how much she'd given Integra, or how much the incident had affected her. She felt more comfortable now, at least in body, her dark desires sated. But her mind…

"Do…I have to sleep in a coffin now?" She asked, slowly.

"It would probably be a good idea." Said Seras, nodding.

"Why…do you, sorry, we, have to sleep in coffins?"

"We don't have to, but they're totally dark and pretty much soundproof. I doubt you've had a chance to appreciate the acuity of your senses yet, but they're superhuman, Integra. You can see in the dark with just the tiniest hint of moonlight or starlight, and hear a pin drop from across a crowded room. The dark and silence inside a coffin is amazingly comforting."

She turned from the window, smiling at the newly born vampire. "And, it's actually surprisingly comfortable, if you bring a pillow in with you."

Integra smiled. "I tell you what." Seras said "I'll get Walter to knock you up a coffin-bed, like mine."

"I suppose I'll have to sleep in the cellar?"

"You haven't seen the sunlight with your new eyes yet Integra. As you know, vampires dislike the sunlight intensely. It's far too bright for our eyes to cope with, it drains our ability to use vampiric magic, and we sunburn like that" She snapped her fingers "We're fine in the evening, when the sun has gone down, or when it's overcast, but we still need sunglasses, and its not exactly pleasant, however much your human side wants it to be."

Integra nodded slowly. Her face was the picture of misery, and with a little sob, she began to cry, tears of blood rolling down her cheeks. Seras bent down brushed her forehead.

"Oh, don't cry…please don't cry…"

"I've failed Seras…I've failed. In my extremity I turned away from the sure straight path and took…and took…"

"The lure of immortality." Said Seras. "But what else could you have done? Sign Hellsing over to your infant son and husband? Even I would have qualms at serving them. Alucard would barely take one look at them before he'd be on his way back to Romania. You need to be here for Hellsing, or we'll be over-run, by the undead, section XIII or both."

"But…but Seras…I'm a monster."

"You're not a monster. We don't have to be monsters."

"I just drank four pints of blood Seras, blood! And it was the best thing I've ever tasted. And now my mouth tastes of iron filings. It's horrible…I can't stand it, can't stand the whole thing, living at night, drinking blood, sleeping in a coffin…how will I manage? And it's endless Seras, endless…"

"You think I don't know?" asked Seras, taking out her handkerchief to wipe the blood from Integra's eyes, "You think I haven't had these thoughts? But it's better for both of us now, Integra. We two can take our cursed unlife together, one night at a time. We'll never end up as monsters."

"Alucard…"

"Alucard was a monster even before he was a vampire. He killed thousands, he drunk blood even as a human, and then, one day, he accidentally drunk the blood of a vampire. All times done for him is to add insanity to the mix. You and I have both seen him, Integra. But we, we were, whilst not saints, not despicable monsters during our human lives. We have to maintain that through eternity."

"Yes…master."

"Please don't call me that Integra…it's too confusing."

"But…"

"I know, Integra." Seras cradled her head. She had ceased crying now, was merely sniffling pathetically. An iron woman crushed. "I know." She had felt it too once, for him. And how had he repaid her? Hah! She could at least do better for Integra than he had done for her.

Seras walked slowly up the steps of the mansion, Integra lying in her arms as before, in the classic pose, her eyes closed as she rested from her ordeal. She had the two guards open the door with little but a glare, and stepped through…to find Walter and Alucard standing there. On the first floor landing, up the stairs, Julian Hellsing stood, holding tightly to the shoulders of his son.

Alucard walked towards her, his face indecipherable with his eyes concealed behind those damned goggles. He reached out, his gloved hand roughly prying apart Integra's mouth. Seras slapped his hand away, holding her fledgling protectively closer. But Alucard had seen enough, seen the long, hard fangs. His mouth tightened, his fists clenched. He turned, walking away. He was actually shaking. His lips drew apart into a fanged snarl.

Then, with a roar, he smashed one of the globe ornaments off the lower banister post, sending it flying across the room, where it smashed into a thousand pieces against the wall.

"WHY!?" He screamed turning around. "For years I try, for years I offer, for years I cajole and manipulate, and then! THEN! She succumbs to your wiles in a single night!"

"It wasn't…"

"Shut up police girl! Just shut up!" She had never seen Alucard this angry, or never this type of angry anyway. He hadn't called her 'police girl' for ten years now.

He laughed, a hideous racking sound, turning from her again, clutching his face with one hand.

"It's the irony that hurts so much, police girl. Among the many reasons I turned you, one of the chief was to make _her_ jealous." He pointed at Integra. "I wanted to give her a reminder that there was no guarantee of the option always being open. You helped me get close police girl, damned close."

He turned again. He looked fierce, his face snarled up like a wolf's "In the prison, after Incognito, I visited her every night, and she came _so_ close to giving in. But then she was pardoned! A few nights more was all I needed. After that it was work this, work that, then her marriage to that pathetic bastard" he pointed one white-gloved finger at Julian, who sneered at the vampire. "Then that brat" Arthur held closer to his father. Seras could feel Integra drawing closer to her as well, her hand scrunching up a handful of Seras' raincoat.  
"And now," said Alucard, turning once again "She is taken from me forever. Hah…why? Maybe those rumours among the soldiers are true, eh? Maybe she really does prefer women."

Seras hissed like a cat, her eyes narrowing.

"Piss off, you chauvinistic, arrogant bastard!" screamed Seras, her anger and pride getting the better of her, as it sometimes did. "Why would she want you as a master? You were a cursed failure as mine, I was almost glad to be rid of you."

Alucard said nothing, but simply turned away once again and stalked off into the shadows of the hall, disappearing somewhere within the walls of the mansion, whence to no-one could tell.

"Don't worry Integra…he's gone."

Integra opened her eyes. "I didn't think…he would be so…"

"Hush…we can talk about it later." She said in a low whisper "There's the uncomfortable prospect of your family now. Be strong, Integra."

"I don't want to…"

"You must."

Seras walked forwards slowly, up the stairs, her eyes shadowed by her unruly hair. Step by step, feeling Integra's grip grow tighter with every step, she slowly ascended the stairs, till she stood in front of the remaining two human members of the Hellsing family.

"You demon." Said Julian, coldly. "Why did you…"  
"She ordered me too. The seals forced me to obey. You'll have to ask her the reason, although I think it's pretty obvious."

"Oh, _really_…"

"Yes" Said Integra, opening her crimson eyes which caused her son to flinch in fear. "To prevent you from ever getting your slovenly hands on the Hellsing organisation." Julian sneered at her. "Had I died, you would be in charge. Now I can wait for as long as I want till I know our son,the right appointed heir of Hellsing, is ready to take up his post, and free of all…unfortunate influences." She looked up. "Put me down…Seras." There was just the hint, in that pause before saying Seras, that she might have been forming an m on her lips.

Seras gently lowered Integra's legs to the floor, and helped her stand upright. She stood firmly, a lot stronger now that she had drunk.

"Arthur…" she said, looking down at her son, a sad expression on her face. "You must still be prepared to lead Hellsing. I will retire in your favour when you are ready…it is unseemly for a demon to command our noble order.

"Mother…"said the little boy, reaching out for her with one hand that Julian unsuccessfully tried to hold back. She knelt and held his hand between hers, looking at him intently with her crimson eyes.

"I did this for you, Arthur, for you and Hellsing. I took this cursed unlife so that I could continue to protect you until you were of age. Don't think for a moment that I did this for myself, after everything I have said to you and taught you."

Arthur shook his head.

"But I'm afraid that I can't spend as much time with you anymore, except for lessons. I'm no longer human, Arthur…I can't have that taint corrupting you. We'll find a nanny, or something."

"But mother…I don't want."

"I'm not your mother anymore, Arthur. I'm something else." She gave him a tight lipped smile, trying her best not to show him her teeth.

"But…" the boy said, as he began to cry.

"Don't cry, Arthur. Your mother is dead, but you shouldn't cry." She looked up, her eyes becoming hard. "You, on the other hand, can do whatever you want."

"I suppose I can. It did say, 'till death do us part', Integra."

"It hasn't parted us yet…" She lifted her glasses up to rub her eyes, and turned to Walter, who had been slowly walking up the stairs behind her, "Do you have any idea as to how this is going to work out legally, Walter?"

"That's up to the authorities to decide, Sir Integra. The relevant authorities have already been informed that you are mortally wounded, and I think they might expect something like this. I don't think any of us will get much sleep tonight."

"Neither do I, Walter." Said Integra, turning to walk down the stairs. "Neither do I."

Seras followed her as she walked, slowly and deliberately, down the steps to the underground cellars, her head drooped, her hands slack.

"But first, Walter, get me a coffin."


	4. Legal and Moral Complications

Walter found himself self-consciously straightening his tie as the black car drew to a halt on the gravel drive in front of the Hellsing institution. It's doors opened to disgorge two dapper looking gentleman, one tall and thin, the other short and rotund, both wearing identical matching suits and bowler hats, each with a briefcase in one hand. Their hair might have been a little greyer than the last time Walter had seen them, but nothing else had changed.

They bowed in front of Walter

"Mister Ddolneaz, a pleasure to meet you."

Walter bowed himself, slightly lower.

"The pleasure is mine in receiving two such eminent visitors from her Majesties government. Please, come in. I will direct you to somewhere we can talk."

Walter led the two men up the stairs to the second floor, along the corridor which held Integra's office, and to a small room at the end which had once served as the disgraced Richard Hellsing's private study. The walls were lined with old books, kept miraculously free of dust by the tireless effort of the staff. Walter motioned to the two men to take a seat on a cracked brown leather sofa drawn up against one wall. They seated themselves, laying their briefcases across their laps. Then Walter himself sat, in an old green armchair positioned across from them.

"Now, Mr. Ddolneaz, you said you had an urgent matter to discuss with us that was far too important for the telephone." Said the short one, "Are we correct in thinking this has something to do with the garbled reports of the serious, or indeed, mortal wounding of Sir Hellsing?"

"Well…" There was a knock at the door. "Ah! Come in." Said Walter, gesturing the maid inside. "Tea, gentlemen?"

"Most hospitable of you Mr. Ddolneaz." Said the tall one. "I will have mine with a touch of milk and no sugar. My companion will have his with cream and four lumps."

The maid poured their tea, and handed each one a china cup.

"Thank-you, Angela. You may leave us now." said Walter. The maid curtseyed and left.

"Now, Mr Ddolneaz…" continued the short one.

"Sir Hellsing is dead gentlemen. Her heart ceased beating at precisely seven forty six AM yesterday."

"I'm sorry to hear it." Said the taller one, the barest hint of a look of relief coming to his face, "I'm sure a full state funeral…"

"A funeral is out of the question, Gentlemen," Said Walter, slowly taking a sip of his tea, which was without milk or sugar, "I doubt you could persuade Sir Hellsing to stay in the coffin. She seems to be quite unreasonable about them."

"Ah." Said the short one, removing his bowler hat and laying it on top of his briefcase. "We had expected something like this."

"Then you of course know the reason she chose such a thing over death?"

"Of course, of course." It was the tall one again "Her heir is only nine, and Lord Julian Chalmondley-Hellsing wasn't chosen as a husband for her on account of his keen analytical mind." Both men permitted themselves a small, polite laugh. "Indeed, Sir Hellsings…partial demise, shall we say, is probably a fortuitous turn of events. However, there are legal and moral issues to be considered."

"Of course." Said Walter, nodding sagely

"The first and most important question" Said the short one "Is will Sir Hellsing retain her human personality now that she is…erm…undead?"

"I see no reason why she should not, the greater part of it anyway. There is no way that anyone could remain completely unchanged by such a traumatic event, but Sir Integra was…is, a determined and resourceful woman. Once she has come to terms with her new diet and lifestyle, her personality should stabilise quite quickly. She will, of course, be affected by her vampirism…and particularly by her new dependence on her master…"

"Ah yes." Said the tall one, "If you can arrange a meeting with this, what is his name 'Alucard', so we can…"

He was cut off by Walter's laughter.

"She was not turned by Alucard." Walter simply stated

"But we assumed…"

"You assumed wrongly, Mr. Eldridge." The tall man looked slightly shocked that Walter knew his name. It was always good to keep something up your sleeve for times like this. "Sir Integra was observing a mission when she was attacked by one of the targets. She suffered fatal stab wounds to her chest and abdomen. Alucard was, at the time, here in the mansion, and though Sir Integra is bound to him by the seals, she hadn't the strength to call him. Instead, she commanded Seras to perform the act, and her seals forced her to obey, against her better instincts."

"Against her instincts?"

"Seras, more than any other vampire I have ever met, considers vampirism a curse. She admits to enjoying, craving even, blood and violence, such things are impossible to contain for the nosferatu, yet she would, all things be told, far rather be a normal, mortal human."

"I see…" said the short man "The other question is, do we have Sir Hellsing's assurance that she will step down when her son is ready to take his position? We cannot have her ruling Hellsing forever…it would arouse suspicion, to say the least."

"How many people got the news of her wounding."

"Only our department. We weren't planning on telling the other knights without confirmation. After all, despite security codes, a voice on a telephone is just a voice on a telephone, as I am sure you are aware, Mr. Ddolneaz."

"So therefore, I imagine the simplest thing to do would be to carry on as if nothing had happened."  
"Indeed Mr. Ddolneaz. How much has her appearance changed?"

Walter thought for a moment, taking another sip of his tea. "She looks ten years younger, she has fangs and red eyes. Her fangs aren't particularly large, though. Indeed, when she's not feeding they could almost pass for abnormally large human canines."

"When she's feeding…?"  
"Vampires fangs are partially retractable. They have to be otherwise their jaws could not close properly. Their fangs only extend to their full length when they feed. It's a natural reflex reaction, as much as anything about vampires can said to be natural, and even the transfusion blood we feed our vampires sets it off."

"I see. So Sir Hellsings teeth need no attention then…"

"I did say 'almost'"

"Ah…well, we can cover it up, can't we?"

"They can't be filed down, or anything like that. They'd simply regrow. I think Sir Integra might just need to keep her lips together a bit. As for her eyes, either tinted spectacles or contact lenses will see to those."

"You said she also looked younger…"  
"We shall need a make-up artist or something then. If she is to look convincingly

human, we must also convince her to drink blood before attending any sort of function, as that will alleviate the classic deathly pallor."

"I must say that you know a lot about vampires, Mr. Ddolneaz. How long have you been in the service of the Hellsing institution?"

Walter laughed, revealing teeth that were perfectly normal, if rather white. "I've never been accused of _that_ before," he said, laughing "Though I have been accused of a lot else."

"Of course, what was it, Angel of Death?"

Walter merely smiled. "In my younger days. I am now far too old to give even ghouls a decent fight. Now, so what will happen when Sir Integra gives up her post?"

"We will fake her death, wait a few months, then the Hellsing organisation can 'acquire' a new vampire from somewhere, much as you acquired officer Victoria fifteen years ago."

"I will have to discuss this with…"  
"That is not a negotiable offer, Mr. Ddolneaz."

Walter came to a sudden realisation "You already had a plan for this didn't you?"

"We have been planning for this situation for twenty-five years Mr. Ddolneaz,

just as we have been planning for every other conceivable or inconceivable situation, from a war with France to the assassination of the Prime Minister. Planning for things is our job." The plump little man sat a little more erect as he said this, his moustache puffing up.

"Now, is it possible we have an interview with this...Seras? There is something we need to discuss with her."

"If you're talking about breaking the blood bond, forget it. She's not ready yet."

The two men jumped in surprise, and turned this way and that, before looking up to where Seras was clinging onto the ceiling like a lizard.

"Sorry gentlemen, it seems I forgot to knock."

She dropped, twisting in mid air to land in front of the two men, where she bowed deeply.

"Don't try to intimidate us, monster." Said the tall one, looking very affronted.

Seras grinned. Her fangs were most certainly _not_ retracted.

"A No Life Queen never _tries_ to intimidate anyone, Francis." The man jumped when he heard her use his first name. "Isn't that right, Quentin?" The little mans moustache bristled like an angry hedgehog.

"How did you get in here?" Asked Eldridge, nervously, trying to avoid making eye contact with the vampiress

"I came down the chimney, if you must know." Said Seras, brushing down the sleeves of her coat. "I can't walk through walls like my former master, but I can cling to them like glue. Comes in handy."

"I'm sure it does…" Said the shorter one, whose name was Henderson "err…so you say that you won't break the blood bond?"

"I'm not sure that you appreciate the difference between being a fledgling vampire and a No Life King or Queen. A fledgling has the constant presence of their master to support them through the most harrowing period of their unlife, whilst we…" She paused, searching for words "We are alone and naked in the dark. She would never be able to cope."

"But, err, may I call you Seras, by the way?"

"Call me whatever you want. I've been called enough things not to care anymore."

"Well Seras, I take it you do see the problems that your er, bond with Sir Hellsing has when compared to the command structure of the Hellsing organisation?"

"I take it that you are referring to the cruel irony that we both have absolute command over each other, she through the seals and I through the blood, correct?"

"Indeed…It could create problems…"

"Why?" she asked, turning away and strolling towards the offices tall Victorian windows. "I may drink blood, sleep all day in a coffin and crawl on walls, but I am still an obedient servant of the Crown. I will play along with your little masquerade to the letter, and take whatever orders my fledgling will give. If she finds herself unable to command me, I will command her to command me. And, when _I_ think she's ready, I will sever our bonds. But," and at this she set her teeth into a feral snarl "not one second before."

"Very well, err, Miss Victoria" said the taller and less bold of the two "I suppose you know best."

She raised one eyebrow.

"You have no idea."

"Alucard!"

Integra had been searching for him for hours now, to no avail. His rooms deep in the cellars were empty, as was the rest of the underground complex, and she could not go up to the upper section, for her troops believed her to be recovering from a grievous injury in some hidden medical facility down here.

Damn him, where would he hide? He was probably lurking in the shadows of the mansion somewhere, or maybe he had gone off into the forests around the house. She could always stay in his room and wait for him…but no, that would be a bad idea. He would probably just go and sleep somewhere else, in the attic or something similar.

His reaction to her transformation by Seras had shocked her deeply. How was she lost to him? Secretly, as a teenage girl, she had fantasised about him, about the handsome, charming but unbelievably deadly monster, who she had the power to bend to her every whim through the seals and rituals her ancestor Abram had bound him with. The results, the less overtly sexual of them anyway, were looked in that little secret book in her desk. Hormonal ravings of a introverted teenager, she thought to herself, cursing. Twisted gothic romance fantasies born from the mind of a desperate seventeen year-old virgin, brought up studying dark magic and the undead. She had outwardly eschewed these as she had grown older, though still they remained there, somewhere in her secret inner heart…when he had offered her his blood, in the tower when she had lost everything, it had been so tempting…her darkest dream, to become a vampire, and walk the night with him for eternity, doing goodness knows what…But she had refused, grown strong, and, surely he had lost her when she had married Julian and conceived their son? She was no longer a virgin, and, as she knew from her long studies of lore, virginity was what linked sex and vampirism on the deepest level. For a male vampire to turn a female, she must be a virgin, and vice versa, otherwise they became ghouls. A non-virgin could only be turned by someone of the same gender as they. That peculiar by-law of supernatural biochemistry was how the FREAK chips had been able to turn anyone, even obvious non-virgins like the Valentine brothers.

But now…against all chance, she was a vampire. She had lost everything, her family, her honour, her pride, but at least she could now have him, she thought, she could fulfil that dark fantasy…

But instead, that anger, that anguish and malice. Why? She tried to picture his face, beautiful even in all that anger…but found that she couldn't. Odd, she had a good imagination, she could surely…no, she closed her eyes and she couldn't see what she knew she should be able to see: the wild black hair, the active, sensuous lips, the deep dangerous eyes, the hooked nose…it was as if someone had thrown a veil over her minds eye, all she saw when she imagined Alucard was a vague sense of red, a flash of orange tinted sunglasses and a fanged grin. She couldn't see him…she could see Seras all right, the soft crimson eyes, the short blonde hair, the curvaceous figure, the delicate hands, the broad sweep of the hips…

Oh god.

Oh god no.

Walter, Walter…the smell of tea, a circle of light from his monocle, neatness. Nothing more. Father…a rough beard, intense eyes with just a pink blur surrounding them…she went through more, an endless succession of blurs, shadows and half-realised sketches of people…but her…She could see every detail, every play of light and shadow on porcelain skin, every falling sweep of wild hair, every glint of eye and tooth, every movement, every mannerism, hanging there under her tightly shut eyelids. She could almost hear her softly accented voice in her ears, almost smell her: shampoo and blood, almost tangible. It was like she was there in the room, like she could feel her, like she could _touch _her…

She recoiled from herself, her eyes shooting open, and fell against a wall, clutching at the dank stonework with gloved hands.

Oh god.

Wherever she looked, there was nothing but the serenely smiling face of her master, Seras Victoria.

A/N: I know what you're thinking. It's a word with four letters, beginning in a Y and ending in an I, best remembered as the name of a character from the Dirty Pair anime.

If I have the guts to write this as it should be written, you could be right, to an extent. If possible I'll try and keep it staying PG-13. This goes for swearing and gore content as well.

Next chapter: Integra re-emerges as the leader of Hellsing. How long can she maintain appearances under the scrutiny of her employees, her fellow knights…and Iscariot?


	5. Unpleasant Assignments

Her eyes could see every detail of it: every facet of refracted light in crushed ice, every polished nickel gleam of metal, and in the centre…

Don't look…don't look. Her eyes slid around it, but her superhuman vision still told her all she needed to know. She saw glimpses of clear plastic, red liquid, medical labelling…a blood packet, sitting in the crushed ice, for her to drink. For her to drink…the thought of it both disgusted and excited her. She knew what it would feel like to drink it, knew too well. Oh dear god…she knew far too well. Yet…it was blood. Some time in the previous month someone had gone into a blood donation centre, signed some forms, had a pint of blood drained from their arm and been given a cup of tea and a biscuit. Their blood had been taken, mixed with preservative chemicals and refrigerated. It had passed through several hospitals and other medical facilities maybe, before some order had commandeered it to the Hellsing institution, and now it sat in front of her, on a small oak table with a green cloth, laid as if for the soup course of dinner. What would that person have felt if they were to be shown the truth, the darkness that lay behind the elaborate curtain of lies being spun by countless organisations belonging to countless governments around the world? This blood had been given in good faith, to help the sick and needy, and here was she, some filthy greedy blood-sucking monster, about to use it for little more purpose than to satiate her perverse lusts. Thank goodness the plastic insulated it, thank-goodness she could not smell it…yet the very sight of it entranced her, made her stomach keen with hunger, her fangs lengthen. The bright clinical red, sitting amid the slowly melting purity of the crushed ice, it was so beautiful.

So appetising.

God! She had to concentrate on something else…what was there? The small temporary room was bare: the rosewood coffin, its lid half open and the blankets and pillow she was using to try and make it seem more like a normal bed spilling onto the floor provided some visual stimulus, but not enough. There was nothing else apart from that. The coffin, the chair she sat on, the table and the blood. Blank stone walls and a metal door, old strip lighting in the ceiling…was she really going to have to live in a room like this forever…she thought of Seras' brave but useless attempts to humanise her quarters…some furniture from her old flat, cheap pictures and photos on the wall… and still it was so obviously a cold dark cellar room, a crypt, even if it was a crypt with an en suite bathroom. Seras…god dammit, what was wrong with her, Seras seemed to loom in her mind like an ever-present shadow.

_I am ever-present, Integra_.

Seras voice rang clear and sharp in her head. What the…

"Seras?" she asked the room at large.

_You don't have to speak, Integra. As long as we are bound by blood our minds are linked_.

_Okay_. She thought.

_That's the way. I was keeping this back, worrying it might unsettle you…but you seem to be fine with it._ She felt some presence moving behind her eyes. _Why haven't you drunk your blood yet, Integra? You're weak, you need to drink it._

_I seem to remember you held out two whole weeks before succumbing to temptation, Seras_.

_I was one of the most badly cared for and idiotic fledglings of all time, Integra. You are a vampire now and forever, there's nothing you can do about it, unless you fancy a long cool glass of holy water, so drink the blood._

_ But…_Integra thought all the thoughts she had on the blood, pushed them to the front of her mind. She vaguely felt Seras examining them.

_It's quite a foolish reason not to drink._

_ But they gave…_

_ The gave their blood to help others. Doesn't Hellsing help others? Without us, the monsters would come for them in the night and tear them to shreds. Their blood helps defend them from the evil undead. _Integra felt Seras take some sort of mental pause for breath, doubly out of place since, as a vampire, she only breathed to pass air over her vocal chords. _Would you rather that you drank their blood safely and neatly from this plastic packet, or some FREAK ripped their throat out and sucked them dry, eh?_

Integra kept her mental voice silent whilst her mind reeled.

"Well?"

She hadn't heard the door open behind her. She whipped around. Seras stood leaning against the door post, her hands deep in the voluminous pockets of her raincoat, smiling slightly. Maybe eight or nine years ago, now, Seras had come to her with the complaint that her modified police uniform was pretty much impractical for hunting the undead, and Integra had, grudgingly, agreed, even though Seras was a ranking member of Hellsing, unlike Alucard, and her being out of uniform wasn't strictly proper. The clothing she'd eventually arrived at was in some way similar to her former masters, but of far more modem mien. A wild-west style brown leather raincoat, good for concealing weapons and ammunition, over a long-sleeved red top, black jeans, military combat boots and a broad brown leather belt with a large metal buckle depicting, of all things, a stylised vampire bat. Round her neck was a black ribbon, which neatly concealed the two tell-tale scars of her turning and the now fading vertical gash left by one of Anderson's holy blades. Her eyes looked out from behind the red-tinted glass of a pair of thin-framed spectacles. She still wore the bright colours that had made her a running joke in her first years at Hellsing, but only off duty.

"Seras, it's just…"

"It's just that you're humanity desperately wants to find some excuse, however pathetic, not to drink that blood."

"That's not true!"

"It is and you know it. I thought up exactly the same excuses when I was trying not to drink. Everything from 'It wasn't donated to feed vampires' to, 'I might catch AIDS'." She laughed "No wonder Alucard always used to scoff at me. We can't even experience the effects of drugs or poisons in the blood we drink, much less catch STD's from it."

"But I…"

Seras walked over to the table and sat down on it, gently removing the packet of blood from the ice bucket. Then, with slow deliberation, she tore off the tab and poured it into the bowl in front of Integra. The smell assaulted the young vampires nostrils, and she almost gagged…it smelled so good...she felt herself beginning to drool.

"Mmm.,," said Seras, taking a sniff "Whoever donated that was a virgin. Drink up

quick, before I have it."

"But…"

Seras picked up the stainless steel spoon and scooped up some blood.

"Don't make me have to feed you, Integra. Your pride's already had enough

blows."

"I…"

Seras held the spoon closer to Integra's mouth, looking into her eyes. Integra

clamped her lips firmly shut, tried to look away…it was haunting her, those eyes…why on earth had she ever done this? How could death be worse? Hah…this _was_ her death…

"Come on, Integra, don't be stubborn. You've already made the choice to become a child of the darkness. There are subsequent choices still, but this isn't one of them."

"Seras, I…"

"Come on, please Integra! You need to drink this, otherwise how the hell are you going to be strong enough for your meeting with the knights representatives? Eh?"

Oh god, why did Seras have to remind her of that, anymore than the pressure against her ribs of the case containing her new steel blue contact lenses?

"Look, Integra, didn't you ever have to take unpleasant medicine as a child?" Integra nodded "Well, think of this like that. You don't want to do it, but you have to. And you do have to Integra. You're as pale as death, and practically radiating cold. The blood will flush your skin and warm you up, at least to the level you might expect of a quite ill human."

Seras held the spoon closer. Integra opened her lips slightly, allowed her tongue to come out, slowly, gingerly, touch the blood on the spoon…then she found herself suddenly jerking forward to engulf the whole spoon in her mouth as she felt the first taste on her tongue…oh…that taste…nothing had ever tasted like that whilst she was alive, she was sure.

"But of course…" said Seras, as she withdrew the spoon from Integra's mouth, leaving a little trail of saliva, "Childhood medicines don't taste anywhere near as nice as this…"

Integra's pupils had dilated, and her tongue was still practically hanging over her lower lip.

"Seras, please can I have the spoon?"

Seras handed her the spoon. She took at and, slowly, began spooning the blood into her mouth, getting faster and faster as her lust for the rich red fluid overtook her. Seras smiled, remembering her first proper time, when she had grabbed the bowl and poured it down her throat, allowing the blood to dribble down her chin. She had been hungrier than Integra was though.

She stood up, patted her fledgling on the back.

"Good girl." She said, before walking to the door.

"Stick those contacts on and meet me and the doctors by the basement steps, OK?" Integra was too busy feeding to speak, but she managed to nod her head between spoonfuls.

Integra found herself licking the bowl clean as she finished. Damn, it tasted so nice…she almost felt happy now, between the warmth the blood was spreading through her and the praise from her master…

She shook her head. Damn, this was so confusing. She was Seras' master, she had the power to command her through the ritual of the seals, yet now...and not only was Seras now her 'master' but she seemed to be able to think of _nothing_ but the blonde haired former policewoman. She was so sharp in her mind, every…oh God. No, think of other things, think of other things…like this damn conference. Trust the damned MI5 to pick up the rumour of her mortal wounding. They'd like nothing better than her to be dead, they still took the naïve view that Hellsings mission was to eradicate all vampires. Hah! They couldn't even begin to see the arrogance in that statement. There must be at least a thousand vampires, FREAKs and other creatures of the night in England at any one time, most of them causing absolutely no trouble, taking small amounts of blood from victims in the guise of love-making, or whilst they slept, or drinking from animals. Hellsing had enough on its hands dealing with the one to five percent of the undead population that _was_ a threat rather than trying to root out entrenched elder vampires who could conceivably be as powerful as Alucard.

Well, now she would have to disappoint her critics by turning up alive, albeit wheelchair bound and bandaged, to lend weight to the story of an injury. Oh, but if only they knew the truth…she grinned, as she effortlessly coiled the spoon round her index finger. Oh yes…But no. No-one would ever know. She would rule Hellsing till Arthur was ready and 'die' young. No-one but those necessary would ever know she was anything other than human: Hellsing's medical staff knew, of course, as did some of the higher ranking house staff under Walter, those who could scarcely have not noticed the fact that three buckets of iced blood were being prepared instead of two, apart from that, the inner circle of government, her immediate family, and of course Walter and Seras. No-one else had the faintest idea. She smiled. Maybe she could live at least a partly human life for a little while longer…but oh god, what if she got invited to a dinner party, or something…No, she had to stop worrying, do what Seras had said, take this whole thing one night at a time. There was no other way to do it.

"Ah, Integra!" Sir Rutherford said, grinning like an idiot, "So glad to see you recovering so quickly after your terrible injury." First names. The MI5 commander must really be annoyed to see her alive.

Integra simply smiled back, keeping her lips most firmly together. "I'm gratified by your concern, Edgar. However, we Hellsing's are hardy stock. It takes more than a scum vampire to kill us."

"But of course, of course! I'm just so glad to see you alive and relatively well when we all thought for a few terrible hours that you were dead."

"I'm sure those hours crawled by like years for you, and you too, Jonathan." Sir Maybridge, chief director of infrastructure, smiled in the way people who have nothing to be happy about smile when they want to put on an act. Why was he here, Integra wondered? A quiet, melancholic man who did something to do with stocks and shares, his position among the knights almost ceremonial, like so many others. Only she, and the other knights who represented divisions of intelligence and the military actually served any useful function. Pen pushers like Maybridge were just there to nod and sign forms if they needed any motorways closed off or any buildings taken out of the power grid.

"Indeed, Sir Hellsing" It could of course just be that Rutherford had brought along Maybridge because he detested her so much, chauvinist bastard that he was. That was most likely it.

"So, apart from pleasantries, was there any purpose to this visit, gentlemen?" There almost certainly was. Otherwise, it would have been a letter wishing her good health and a bouquet of flowers or something equally petty and uninspired. No, they wanted something, and who they had sent was a sign. The two hated her, but they were physical representatives of the Round Table. Not as good as sending people who could actually tolerate her existence, but better than nothing.

"Actually," said Rutherford smarmily, taking a file from the desk and walking over to her wheelchair, "There was something." He dropped the file on her lap and stood away from her, probably feeling some false sense of security and superiority over the frail-looking woman, her face pale and lined (the makeup made her look far older than she had been when she was alive), sitting in a wheelchair with a tartan rug over her lap. If only the smug little shit actually knew... The knowledge that she was easily capable of standing up, walking over to him and ripping his arms off both comforted and frustrated her. She was, indeed, stronger now than she had ever been, at least in body if not in mind. Yet she must fake disabilities for these spineless humans, when she could tear them apart like sodden tissue paper.

She caught herself. Damn, it was so easy to slip into thinking like that. That was how Alucard thought, aloof bastard. He was deliberately avoiding her now, and she was unwilling to invoke the seals, because she was, in some ways, avoiding him too. What she needed was a chance meeting in some corridor or deserted room, but, of course, it was impossible. Alucard could now only sense her more keenly, and, whilst she had begun noticing a strange tingling at the back of her neck when Seras was nearby, her own extrasensory perception was tragically weak compared to the six-hundred year old No Life King. Anyway, what chance did she have of cornering someone who could walk through walls?

She looked down at the file. It was of plain vanilla card, with a top secret stamp covering most of one side, below a label, which read 'BELFAST REPORT' in clear block capitals.

"This is going to be about Iscariot, isn't it?" she asked, looking up. Rutherford gave a noncommittal shrug. She opened the folder. The first thing that leapt out at her was the photo of Father Lieberwitz, Iscariots chief Irish operative. He was of average height, looking about thirty, with long black hair drawn back into a ponytail. He wore form-fitting black vestments, a long black coat and a silver cross hang at his neck. The small bio sheet told more of the truth about him. A regenerator, estimated age somewhere between eighty and a hundred, capable of surviving unbelievable injuries and never aging. A monster created by the Vatican using a mixture of magic and crude science back in the nineteen-twenties. Thankfully, on the few occasions he had come into conflict with Hellsing officers attempting to pursue their duties in what was nominally both part of the united kingdom and a protestant country, his fighting style had left him unable to simply slaughter them for 'collaborating with vile demons' as other Iscariot operatives were wont to do, although he had had a few bouts with both Alucard and Seras, which had thankfully all been ended before either side had done too serious an injury to the other, though when it is nigh-on invincible immortals doing the fighting, the concept of 'serious injury' changes somewhat.

"I am already well aware of the existence and appearance of Father Piotr Lieberwitz," said Integra, turning the page to show a photograph of a tennis-ball sized glass sphere imprinted with a cross and the roman numeral XIII, accompanied by several paragraphs of writing, "And of his methods of exterminating the undead. Why are you showing me this."

"Read the next page, Integra." Said Rutherford, smiling congenially as he sat back in his chair.

She did, her eyes widening, but her lips keeping as close together as she dared. Fin ally she looked up.

"Kidnapped? Who the hell would kidnap a regenerator?"

"We have no idea, sir Integra, but it happened on our, or more appropriately, your territory. Maxwell must be scared stiff of you, if he's contacting you through us."

"He's been a bit aloof towards our organisation ever since Alucard worked out how to kill a regenerator after that annoying little bastard with the sniper rifle tried to take out one of our teams."

"Yes, I remember that, er…incident. How did Alucard arrive at the method anyway, it seems rather, well, rather precise, for the heat of battle."

"Experimentation, Edgar, experimentation." Integra allowed her lip to curl into a half smile. Normally, she would have allowed herself a small grin whilst saying something like that, but she thought she could count on neither of these men being a keen enough observer of character to notice something like that.

Rutherford looked uneasy at the thought of such experimentation, but continued on, "Anyway, since Father Lieberwitz went missing whilst on British soil, it falls to your organisation to recover him.

Integra actually laughed at that. "_us_, recover _him_? Gentlemen, number one he should not even have been in Belfast to _be_ kidnapped, number two, doesn't it strike you as audacious for them to ask us for assistance, when Iscariot operatives have been responsible for the deaths of no less than thirty seven Hellsing operatives during the past twenty years? To put that into perspective gentlemen, that makes them more of a threat to our organisation than werewolves."

"Still sir Integra, in the interest of engendering trust and co-operation between your two organisations, who after all have the same purpose…"

"Sir Rutherford," she said, dropping the informality "Hellsing and Iscariot are utterly different organisations, affiliated to different denominations of the church, dealing with different areas of Europe. At no point do our interests collide."

"Except, Sir Integra, in Northern Ireland. On paper, it's a protestant country that is part of the United Kingdom. In reality it has almost total dependence, and half of its practising worshippers are catholic. There have been no less than five incidents this year alone when Hellsing and Iscariot operatives have hunted the same target and come into conflict."

Ah, so this was it. They wanted her to kiss and make better with that zealous little sod Maxwell. Should she refuse? No, how could she. If she refused, it would weaken her standing in the Round Table. They would whisper that she was unwilling to carry out her duty, and the issue of what some saw as her 'lax' attitude towards the undead in employing Alucard and Seras. If those people were ever to find out she herself was a bloodsucker…

"Very well." She said, closing the file. "But let it go on record that I deeply disapprove of this course of action and do not consider Section XIII to be our allies."

"Of course, Integra, now," he reached back to Maybridge, who handed him something, "Get well soon."

So they _had_ brought flowers. How bloody marvellous.


	6. Opening Moves

Walter dialled another number and held the receiver to his ear, taking a sheet of paper from a subordinate as he did so.

"Hello" said a voice from the other end "West Midlands enquirer, John Hoskins, editor."

"Ah," said Walter, rubbing one hand across his brow, "Mr. Hoskins, I believe that you may have recently received some photographs of an unusually large swarm of bats flying across the sky."  
"How the hell do you…"  
"I work for the government, Mr. Hoskins. This is a friendly call to advise you not to put it in your newspaper, or the policemen who will visit you within the hour to confiscate the photographs will have to seize your entire printing run as well."

"What the hell is this, some sort of prank call? Look, even if you do work for the government, there's no way you can suppress…"

"Yes there is, Mr. Hoskins. When you have no paper tomorrow, only you will be to blame" He put the phone down. Oh damn, this was proving to be a stressful night. Unavoidable, but stressful. If Hellsing was going to take on this idiotic mission to rescue this papist regenerator, they had to do their best. Honour demanded little else. Failure would see them become the laughing stock of the Round Table and the Vatican. So, they needed to send an operative capable of tracking and fighting whoever had captured the priest as soon as possible. Who better than the nominal head of their investigation division, former policewoman Seras Victoria?

"I always get these sorts of jobs" she had complained at Walter as she dissolved into a cloud of bats on the Hellsing mansions helipad. He had warned her to try and stay as out of sight as possible, but it was nigh on hopeless. Bats were not built for incredible speed, nor for any altitude above a few hundred feet. He and the rest of the media management department had their work cut out for them. Hopefully, she would be able to gain some height on the thermals over the coast, or at least avoid the major shipping lanes…that's all they needed, swarms of bats plastered over the inshore radio channels.

His phone rang again, indicating that yet another of their plants had just noticed the delivery of photographs of bats to his newspaper. Walter groaned as he picked up the receiver. This mission had better be worth all this.

Seras hugged low over the Irish countryside, doing her best to keep to lowly populated valleys and narrow ravines, but still by no means moving un-noticed. It was damn near impossible for a swarm of over two hundred bats to move un-noticed on a bright summers evening with the waxing moon up. Elder vampires across the British Isles must have been cackling at such an immature and wanton display of ability. Maybe she should be glad that her line of work kept her far out of the social circles of any other vampires, except the ones who'd decided that the rest of the planets population was beneath them and they really needed a Mercadium-processed quicksilver round in their brain.

She really hoped that none of the many people she saw pointing and gawping at her were bat enthusiasts. Bat enthusiasts would have had several things to say about the abnormally small, abnormally light haired and fanged pipistrels*. Damn, whatever form she took, she was blonde. Her hound was a golden retriever for goodness sakes. A golden retriever? Alucard had that huge, demonic Afghan hound, whilst she had something that Walter had once described as 'Quite adorable actually', despite its excessive amount of eyes. She couldn't help but feel it made the job easier for him.

She reformed at a small bus-stop five miles from the outskirts of Belfast, rocking slightly as she made the transition from two hundred odd airborne perspectives to one ground based one. She then checked herself over thoroughly. Her arms still bent the right way, thumbs were on the right bit of the hand, face looked forwards, breasts were the right size, legs the right length…one would have thought that re-assembling yourself afterwards would be a natural process, But no, it actually required quite careful control, or you looked like a cross between a human and a giant bat, which was not a very pretty sight.

It was also exhausting, not just the transformations at either end, but the whole flying bit in the middle. It was one of the fastest means vampires had to travel, next to shadows or simple teleportation, but it did take a lot out of you, especially such a long journey as the one she'd just had. She reached into her coat, found one of the blood packets she had picked up before the mission and drained it quickly, shivering at the unholy nourishment it provided. Licking her lips with her un-naturally long tongue, she put the spent packet back in one of her inside pockets before the bus arrived, not that anyone would probably have raised any fuss at her macabre Capri-sun.

Belfast was just as terrible a place as it had been when she last visited it two years ago. Terrorism and urban decay had worked their twin charms on it to create a festering cesspit of humanity. The FREAK problem here was the worst of any city in the British Isles. Damned FREAKs…they had thought when they destroyed the last factories that the problem would go away, but no…now the FREAKS merely passed their curse on by their bite, a new and modern species of the undead made by arrogant man. It was this huge FREAK population that caused Belfast to be such a battleground between Hellsing and Iscariot. The Catholics were constantly tracking targets across the border to the city, where Hellsing officers would pick up the same target and launch a simultaneous attack. The results were seldom pleasant, and, due to the Vatican's use of regenerators, the casualty count seldom favoured Hellsing.

The bus dropped her off, after a forty minute ride, in a run-down part of the city, near where they had the last definable evidence of Father Lieberwitz's presence, a building full of dead FREAKs and Ghouls he had exterminated…but apparently he'd never left the building. He certainly hadn't made his normal phone call afterwards to tell his superiors back in Dublin that he had completed his mission. When the police got there, they had found evidence of a great struggle on the top floor: bullet holes, bloodstains, but no sign of the Catholic priest…at least none that they, bound to scientific modes of thought, could discern. They could hardly know that the priest they were looking for could survive being cut in half with little more than an amused grin.

Damn, where was this place? She looked down at the hand-drawn map she had made for herself back at Headquarters…damn, she should have asked Walter to do it. She was hopeless at this sort of thing.

"You lost, love?"

Oh damn, this was all she needed. She turned, and saw a young man of about twenty-three walking towards her, holding a flick-knife.

"Look, mate," she said, returning the map to her inside pocket. "It would seriously be in your best interests to just piss off right now and forget you ever saw me."

"Yeah, whatever love, now hand over your…"

Seras was tired, angry and still rather hungry. This was the last bloody straw. She leapt at the man with a hiss and dug her fangs into his neck. He gurgled as she drank about two pints of his blood (damn, she had forgotten how good it tasted warm), more than he could comfortably afford to lose without feeling quite ill, and then, dropped him to the ground, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.

"I did warn you." She said to the blubbering would-be mugger. "But you just wouldn't listen, would you? Thanks for the drink, by the way. Here, get yourself one." She dropped a twenty pound note on his chest and left him lying there in the alleyway. His wounds would already be healing over. With any luck he would now go and get rat-arsed on cheap lager to the point where no-one would care to pay any heed to his tales of being bitten by a vampire.

She hoped he was superstitious. She could imagine him checking for his reflection for weeks to come. That brought a smile to her face as she rounded the corner to find the crime scene. She saw several men, obviously policemen, waiting in front of the door.

Maybe the blood had made her a bit light headed, but she decided she would scare them a bit. Nothing like mortal terror to make someone give you some respect.

She blended into the shadows next to the wall, coming to within a couple of metres of the policemen without them noticing her. She listened to them talk.

"So, when does this 'Special officer' arrive, anyway?"

"I don't know. You never know anything with this 'Hellsing' bunch, they're a funny lot, all sorts of weirdoes working for 'em…"

"Weirdoes, gentlemen?" Asked Seras, stepping from the shadows, causing them all to jump. "That's a new one, anyway." She withdrew her Hellsing ID from an inside pocket and handed it to who she judged to be the senior officer. He looked it over, warily.

"Eye colour red?" he said, after a few moments, looking up at her. She dropped her spectacles and let him look into her crimson eyes.

"You'd better believe it" she said, hitching them back up. The man passed her ID back to her, looking almost fearfully at her chin.

"Erm…have you, er…been in a fight, miss?"

"What?"

"You've got…er…blood, on your chin. Right there."

Seras grinned. "Oh sorry," she said, and extended her tongue to lick it off, causing all the men to flinch in something approaching dread. They had obviously heard what they had thought to be the more colourful rumours about Hellsing, rumours which she was now confirming.

"I always was a messy eater. Now, lets have a look at this crime scene."

She was pretty sure she could count on their full co-operation on this mission.

"I still don't understand why you say you're not my mother." Arthur said, sadly, at the imposing blonde haired figure standing at the window, looking up at the moon. She could never remember the night sky being red before…the moonlight seemed to shine like blood.

"Arthur," she said, as she turned around, "I am not the woman who gave birth to you. I am undead, surely you know from what you've learnt what that means?"

"But mum…you look the same, you speak the same, you even chew those stupid cigars the same…you're the same person…"

"Just in a _very_ different body." She came closer to him. "Look at me Arthur." She opened her mouth wide "Look at my teeth, Arthur, what do you see?"

The little child paused for a moment…

"Well?"

"Fangs, mum…you've got fangs."

"Precisely Arthur, and you of course know what that means."

"It means you're a vampire, mum."

"Precisely." She walked over to the bookcase that lined one wall, and began toying with a volume of Milton. "I'm a vampire. A walking corpse, Arthur. A dead body with no pulse or heartbeat. I'm driven by dark cravings you could never imagine, Arthur. That's what makes me different. I can no longer trust myself to be around people. There's a part of me that wants to drink their blood all the time Arthur. That part of me even wants to drink your blood."

The fair haired child looked scared "You're not are you…"

She smiled, tight lipped. "No, of course not Arthur. I can control it. But what if I lose control? That's why I can't be near you Arthur, for your own good." And of course, she thought bitterly, how can you, the future head of Hellsing, whose destiny it is to fight the evil undead every night of your life, be allowed to love a vampire? What if, when the time came, you hesitated, remembering the pale skinned, red-eyed monster who was your mother, and could not pull a trigger, or give an order, and ended up like me, dying in the street…

She heard the scrape of the chair behind her. She turned, and saw the little boy walk up to her. He paused for a moment, then hugged her round the waist.

"I still love you, mum…even though you're all cold."

She felt the tears well up. Oh no, she was going to weep blood all over her beloved son…she pushed him off, as gently as she could manage with her hideous strength, and ran from the room, the first red droplets beginning to run down her face. She ran through the mansion as quickly as she could, taking the back stairs to avoid meeting anyone, her arm over her face, praying she met no-one, praying no-one saw the blood dripping from her eyes. She banged open the cellar door, and ran down the steps, almost stumbling the last few, along the corridor and to her temporary quarters. She slammed the door shut and fell against it, the warm trickles of blood running down her face to leave great crimson stains on her white shirt and impeccable blue cravat.

"You must leave all human bonds behind you."

Her head jerked up when she heard that deep, mysterious voice.

"Alucard?"

He seemed to appear from the shadows in front of her, fully dressed in his coat and hat, sunglasses over his eyes.

"Integra." He said, sitting down in the chair at which she had had her meal, removing his ridiculous eyewear and looking her in the face.

"I…Why did…"

"You're asking me, Integra, why I am so angry at you. Why I've been avoiding you, yes?"

"I thought you'd be pleased!" She blurted out. "I thought at least someone would like me more as a vampire than as a human!"

Alucard began to laugh. "You don't get it, Integra, do you?"

"What?" She asked, wiping the blood tears from her eyes with stained gloves, "Don't get what?"

He smiled grimly at her. "Who is the dearest person to you in the world, Integra?"

"Seras." She said, without thinking, then she stopped. "No, wait…"

"Don't apologise, Integra, or try and change your answer. Because it's the truth. Seras is now your world, your life, your _master_. Did you not understand what that word _means_, Integra? No, how could you. Up until you were turned you had only seen it from one side…Now, we have all seen it from both sides, and you know what it means now, don't you, the sheer joy of obedience, the love, the respect?"

"I...didn't know…"  
"Hah! No-one ever does, until it comes. Whilst I waited down in that cellar, for all

those years, do you think I was planning on how well I would serve Hellsing? No! I was pondering the infinite number of ways I could kill Van Helsing's cursed heir when they should be foolish enough to come for me…But when I licked your blood off the floor, Integra, the bonds came on me, those dark rituals he had performed, the seals he had etched into my hands. I became yours Integra. I was a prince in life, a count, and a No Life King in death, an aristocrat of the night, and yet, suddenly _I_ was the servant, and the servant of a thirteen year old girl at that."

He looked slyly at her.

"A very…_hormonal_…thirteen year old girl."

If Integra had been capable of blushing, she would have.

Alucard grinned "You seem to forget that I can read people's minds like open books, Integra. And, whilst at first you were a bit young for my tastes, I certainly did not mind your fantasies once you had grown to be more of a woman…"

She gave him a dirty look. "Alucard…"

The nosferatu grinned, but it was hollow. He replaced his glasses.

"I wanted you, Integra. I wanted you more than I have ever wanted anyone before. What made that want more keen was the fact that, unlike everyone else before then, I could not just take you. I had to…tempt you."

"You mean…"

"All those offers of my blood, all those contrite arguments of how much good it would do Hellsing, all those times I interrupted your sleep, all those eyes in your mirror, all of it, every single last bit, was my courtship of you, Integra. For years I tried. Even when you lost your virginity to that pampered cretin I didn't despair. There are always ways and means, Integra. The world of shadow has no rules that cannot be broken. I found a way, as a matter of fact. In one of the books up in the library…not that I will ever need to use it now. It might have been hard to get you to agree to carry out as well, when I come to think of it…but, anyway, what does that make? Twenty four years, Integra. Twenty four years of slow, painstaking work…and then, I lose you in a single night."

She didn't understand. "What do you mean 'lost me', Alucard?"

"I mean exactly that, Integra. You are no longer capable of loving me."

"I am…who else would I…?"

"The police girl of course."

Integra shook with anger. She slammed her fist down on the table, causing it to crack. "What the hell are you implying Alucard!? That I'm bisexual? A lesbian? I've never…"

Alucard stood, his face grim. "Stop lying to yourself Integra. You know your own recent thoughts about the police girl, and though the blood bond is strong enough to alter anyone's outlook, you know as well as I do that you have not always been comfortable with your sexuality."

"WHAT!?" She fumed, smashing her palm on the table again, ploughing straight through the wood with a great splintered crash.

"Integra, you were a virgin till the age of twenty-eight and you wear men's clothes. Most other people…" She struck him, smashing his glasses from his face to shatter against the wall. "That's a damned malicious lie, Alucard!" she screamed "How the hell should how _I_ dress or choose to act lead you to opinion like that, eh?" She punched him again, in the chest. He just laughed, seemingly unperturbed by blows that would have reduced a normal man to shreds of bloodied meat. "Even if you hadn't been broadcasting sexual angst like a lighthouse at me for your whole teenage years, it isn't to hard to guess most of your little complexes and insecurities Integra…especially if you've read a certain little book."

She stepped back, lowering her fist. "You've…read my diary?"

"I read it every night after you went to sleep. Some of the poems about me were actually quite good."

She fell back against the wall, cradling her face in one hand.

"You bastard…"

"Save it for the police girl. I'm sure she'll be more than happy to kiss you better."

Her face became a mask of rage as she sprang at him, but he simply stepped backwards through the wall, chuckling, leaving her to claw at blank stone. She slid down the cold surface…oh god. What he'd said was true, and she knew it. She remembered those thoughts she'd had when she was a teenager, those ones that began 'Well, If I don't seem to like boys…', but…no, that had just been her own angst and insecurity, hadn't it? She just wasn't a sexual person, she was too shy to ask boys out, she was too intimidating, she never got invited to parties…those were the reasons, surely? Surely…?

She held her head in her hands. She just didn't know. She'd never known, she'd just managed to bury it all, to get on with work. She'd hated making love to her husband, but surely anyone would hate doing anything remotely affectionate with that pig…Yes of course….but now, everything was coming up. Not just the recent horrific changes in the last week, the impact of vampirism, of her bond with Seras, but all that old insecurity, about her identity, her sexuality…

She sobbed again, feeling yet more blood trickle down her cheek. She was thirty-seven years old, dead as a doornail and she didn't have the faintest idea who or what she was.


	7. A Man of God

As Seras stepped through the doorway into the inside of the house, she felt it. Her eyes and nostrils stung and she choked slightly. The policemen seemed unaffected. She leaned against the wall, trying not to breath, and succeeding admirably, she needed some air to speak with though…it scalded her throat, burnt her lungs.

"Open the window!" she said, in a hoarse, rasping voice. She could feel her skin tingling with the stuff, good grief, he had a strong batch in this time…

One of the officers made to question why, and she shot him a look which chilled his blood even through the glasses. He flung open the window. Immediately she ran past him and took a deep breath of the outside air. She blinked a few times, and felt her eyes stop stinging,. The stuff was soon out of the room, swirling away into the night. And good riddance to it to. It still disturbed her on some deep level that in ten minutes she had turned from human to something that could be harmed so much by the merest whiff of holiness, but there was no use denying it. At least she hadn't been on the receiving end of the glass spheres that had turned the two ghouls who had been guarding the front entrance into blackened patches of charcoal on the floor and walls.

"What's wrong miss?" asked one of the bolder policemen.

She pointed to the two scorch marks. "Can't you smell it?" she asked. No of course they couldn't, you idiot. They were humans.

"Smell what?"

She shook her head, "Nothing, nothing." She turned back to them, and they all registered looks of shock on their faces.

"What?" she asked. This was actually getting boring.

"You, er, you're crying blood." Said one of them.

She sighed. "Good grief, haven't you people had the lecture?"

"What lecture?" Asked one of them. Oh dear goodness. How was she supposed to work with people like this? You'd have thought that senior policemen in a FREAK infested city such as this would at least have been given some inkling…

She sighed.

"Hello" she said bowing, "My name is Seras Victoria, and I am a master vampire, one who walks the night and drinks blood of my own will. Currently I am under the employment of the British government, more specifically the Hellsing institution. The residents of this building were FREAKs and their ghoul servants. FREAKs are lesser, artificial vampires created using a biochip and ghouls are the animated corpses of the FREAKs victims. Yesterday, Father Piotr Lieberwitz, a Catholic demon-hunter working for Iscariot, the Vatican's private army, entered this building with the purpose of exterminating the occupants. He never reported back. Hellsing has sent me to find the trail of the priests kidnappers and recover him at all costs. There you go, the truth, the whole truth and noting but the truth. You almost certainly don't believe me, although I can see certain things clicking together in your mind. Some things seem to make more sense now, don't they?"

The men were silent, digesting what she had said, thinking things over. All those unexplained happenings, strange disappearances and unusual murders. All those incidents where Hellsing had turned up and fought mysterious paramilitary groups…it almost made sense.

"Now," she said, taking a handkerchief out of her pocket to dab at her bloodstained face, "show me where this struggle took place." She smiled at them as they led her, with uncertain glances, through another door.

As they moved through the house it was not hard to see how the fight had progressed. She had to give this to the regenerator: he was fast and efficient. Doors staved in with a single kick, one or two of the sacred grenades sailing through to deal with whatever was inside. A few bullet holes spattered around the bottom of the stairs indicated that a couple of ghouls had tried to put up a fight, and a piece of black wool, torn out of the priest's coat, showed that they had hit at least once. Their guns lay twisted amid the greasy burn marks that was all that remained of them.

Damn…she was not sure even FREAKs deserved to die like that. At least she killed cleanly, with a bullet to the brain or heart. She had been splashed with holy water just once, on the arm, and she still had horrible memories of tearing her burning clothes from the arm before eventually shooting it off to prevent the blue flames spreading. That had been at the hands of this damned Iscariot dog, which made her even less happy than the rest of Hellsing to be rescuing him.

They led her along the upper corridor of the house, to a room at the end. She could see the bullet holes splintered through the door, and smell a smell she had only smelt once before…regenerator blood. It was sweeter than normal human blood, nothing like as thick and pungent as the blood of a vampire or werewolf, but quite close. She opened the splintered door with one gloved hand and surveyed the scene within. There were glass shards on the floor around the other end of the bare chamber, but no scorch marks. Whoever had shot up the priest had been human. She looked around. There were only a few bloodstains, sprayed across the walls in great circular spatters, as if made by bullet wounds. Normally, regenerators did not bleed. It took significant amounts of damage to make one do so, and even then they were by no means dead…They could only be truly killed, as Alucard had discovered, by decapitating them and ripping out their heart. Anything less and they would eventually regenerate, though severe brain trauma left them a bit odd sometimes, especially young regenerators. She believed that was what had happened to Anderson.

Now. To business. She sniffed the air, the smell of blood nowhere near as strong as it would normally be after a warm meal, and detected a familiar scent on the air. She knelt down next to one of the bullet holes, and worked a finger into the stone to retrieve the round. The depth of the hole only confirmed her nose.

Depleted uranium bullets. Of course. She had had the idea herself, once. Surely the way to beat a regenerator would be to use their powers against them. She remembered that when Alucard had fought Anderson the priest had never expelled the bullets, just healed over them. So what if one was to fill a regenerator full of depleted uranium? She was obviously not the only person to have those thoughts. So, it was humans who had kidnapped the priest then? That shouldn't prove too much of a challenge. She sniffed again…yes, there they were. She paced across the room to the far window. Looking down, she saw a fire escape stretching to the ground.

"Excellent." She said. "I've seen all I need to see. Breathe a word of this to anyone, Gentlemen, and we shall hunt you down and extract a gruesome revenge. Goodnight." And with that she hefted herself through the window and dropped into the shadows. One of the men rushed to the window, but he saw nothing, except a golden haired dog trotting out the alleyway, its nose to the ground as if tracking some scent.

This area of the docks was all but derelict. Run down warehouses, piles of broken crates, rusting hulks of ships. Away from the background noise of all the humans her preternatural senses had no trouble detecting the building Father Lieberwitz was being held in. She felt an indeterminate number of humans in there as well, maybe about twenty, but her senses could only really detect NHBs with any degree of accuracy. The building itself looked half derelict, and would have seemed empty, but for the light coming from its windows.

Keeping an eye out for security cameras, she slowly crept round the perimeter of the structure, assessing it tactically. There was only one door, but it looked like there might be stairs up onto the roof. A fire escape seemed to have been cut off the wall to prevent easy access. From what her senses told her, Lieberwitz was being held in a room on the upper floor…that window? She looked closely. It was small and barred, could be a cell…

She sprinted silently across a piece of wasteland and hugged up with her back against the wall. Then she turned round and dug one hand into the wall, her fingernails latching on like claws. She climbed swiftly but quietly, a few clanks as the weapons and ammunition concealed inside her coat all that marked her passage. When she reached the window she stopped, and peered through carefully, surveying the scene inside with one crimson eye. The first thing she noticed was blood. Lots of blood. And the priest, sitting in the centre of the room, absolutely caked in the stuff, surrounded by a scattering of little bent metal shapes.

He was digging the bullets out of himself.

She gave the rest of the room a cursory glance. No security cameras, no two-way mirrors, a solid door. Good.

"My, my, someone smells good." She said, by way of a greeting. The priest whirled round. His long black hair had come out of its normal ponytail, and fell wildly around his face, matted with blood. He hissed as he recognised her.

"Draculina!" he snarled "So it _was_ your unholy organisation that kidnapped me.

She grinned "Think again, priest. One, if it was us, I'd have come in through the door, two, we would have just killed you."

He curled his lower lip in disgust. "True." He admitted. "So, what have you come here to do then, eh demonspawn? To gloat at a man of God in his extremity, eh monster?" She raised her eyebrows. These damned zealots were so predictable.

"Actually, as much as it pains me to say it, I'm here to deliver you from the clutches of whoever the hell it is that has put you here."

The priest gave a derisive snort. "Hah! You would never come to our aid willingly, vampire, and we would never sink so low as to ask for it. Why are you really here, eh?"

"Look," she said, angrily, "I'm going to come in through the roof, shoot anyone who gets in my way, blow the cell door off its hinges and then carve my way back out through the front door. You can either sit there and do sweet fanny Adams _or_ you can do something useful and tell me how many guards there are. I'm taking these walls are re-enforced, by the way?"

He looked at her for a moment then nodded slowly. "Yes. I've tried my strength against them…steel plate, over the normal structure. Not even the bullets from your hellish gun would penetrate it."  
"A pity." She said, swinging her arm up back onto the stonework. "Any thoughts on the gaurds?"

"About twenty…oh, and vampire…"

"Yes?"

"They have exoskeletons."

"Excellent, that almost makes it fun. See you in a bit, papist dog."

She moved up the last few metres to the roof smoothly, and hoisted herself up onto the ledge. Good…there were no gaurds on the roof. Now to plan her attack. Exoskeletons eh? She didn't know as much about them as she probably should, only that they were a new military concept from America. Hellsing had looked at them, briefly: enhanced strength, increased speed, built in armour…they seemed like perfect tools for fighting the undead. However, on closer examination they possessed none of these things in great enough quantities to actually be of any use against vampires: they weren't strong enough to allow the wearer to take on a vampire hand to hand, or fast enough to allow him to outrun one. It would make things a little bit more exciting though…

She considered weapons. The Jezebel, of course…anything else? She had five or six other guns stuffed away in various pockets. The good old Socom? The Raging Bull? Eventually she made her decision and reached down behind her back to unholster a TMP. Small, light and fully automatic, an excellent counterpart to the powerful semi-automatic Jezebel.

Okay Seras, let's do this thing.

She opened the top door quietly. No-one on the first staircase…excellent. She walked silently down to the door at the bottom, and pushed it open a crack. Beyond was a big room, two storeys high. A gantry extended across it from the door, with one man I what could only be an exoskeleton walking across it. It looked like a cross between medieval armour and a space-suit. Down below in the room were a couple of long tables. Three more men in exoskeletons stood guard, another man was stripping down and cleaning a rifle at the long table and two more were talking up against the far wall.

All too easy.

She grinned devilishly. At what point had she come to enjoy violence? She had no idea, but she was sure it had started at the Tower of London. Whatever, it was with her now…she craved this sort of thing almost as much as blood sometimes. A creature of passions, that was what she was. Blood, violence and sex…she could control that last one, had always been able to, but the other two seemed to get the better of her sometimes…

Let's see how thick that armour is, eh?

She planted a firm kick in the middle of the door. It instantly broke into two halves as she stepped through it, firing three rounds from the Jezebel into the back of the nearest gaurds head. His faceplate exploded, spraying the room with a shower of armoured glass, blood and brains.

Not quite thick enough.

With her other hand she cut down the two in conversation with a spray of automatic fire, their bodies puffing out and spurting red where the bullets struck, seemingly randomly. She brought the Jezebel round and took another one of the armoured ones off his feet before he even had a chance to move, the bullet passing cleanly through his head without exploding. Damned faulty ammo. The other two had now had time to react. They turned and fired at her with their assault rifles. She felt bullets hitting her, blowing chunks out of her, but no pain. Normal bullets could not stop her…

She grinned even more wildly as the idea came to her, then slumped off the gantry, landing on the floor below with a dull crack. She had broken something, obviously. Better not be her spine. That was annoying when that happened.

The two armoured troops lowered their guns. That's right…come closer…she saw two more in exoskeletons come rushing in from a doorway at the top. The unarmoured man gingerly approached her then knelt down beside her, feeling her neck.

"There's no pulse." He said. An American accent…well, well, well... Maybe she should play dead for a bit longer to learn some more.

"Shit me, would you look at that gun?" said one of the armoured ones, his voice muffled by the face-mask.

"How the hell did she fire that thing?"

He reached over as if to pry it from her grip. Ok, no way she was loosing her gun.

"It's quite simple." She growled as she opened her eyes. The mans eyes widened as he looked down at her. She grinned, showing fangs.

"Vampire." She said simply, then head butted him with enough force to break his spine. Blood from his nose spurted across her face as she sat up, the Jezebel roaring as she put a bullet into the head of the two nearest her.

"Silver bullets!" cried one of the farther ones.

So…they have silver bullets, eh? Very interesting…

She leapt forward and rolled, coming up to place another two bullets in the chest of one of the new arrivals, smashing him off his feet. She had five bullets left, and she had killed seven…and the priest reckoned there to be twenty. The other one started firing again, but she made more of an effort to dodge this time. She could see the splatters of mercury coming from the bullet holes. Damn…she rolled back to her feet and shot him in the face, the bullet drilling a neat hole through the glass before the inside of the visor became opaque with blood. She realised she was still grinning insanely, and chuckled to herself. What would the Seras Victoria who had sprinted through that dark forest sixteen years ago, desperately trying to summon up the courage to shoot a few ghouls, have said to her now, a bloodthirsty, trigger-happy undead killing machine?

She really had no idea. Anyway, that was a bit of an exaggerated view of herself, especially next to some of the things she'd seen Alucard do.

She ran across the room to the door the last two had emerged from. As she suspected, there was a stairwell inside. Suddenly, bullets exploded around her, coming from both sides. She regretted the loss of her TMP, dropped in the fall, as she fired the last of the Jezebels clip down the stairs, eliciting screams and a spray of blood that flew up one wall like a paintbrush splatter. A couple of mercury ignition rounds caught her in the back, and she dropped to the floor, rolling to put herself out of the line of fire. The pain was incredible, but she managed to tense her muscles against it, expelling the bullets and flushing out their metallic payload in a spurt of blood. Damn…it was lucky that mugger had came along. She would be in trouble now without that fresh blood in her veins…

She slammed another clip into Jezebel as she heard feet coming down the stairs. She fired her first four bullets through the concrete stairs where the footsteps were coming from. There was a scream and the sound of something heavy and metallic falling. A man in an exoskeleton crashed round the corner of the stairs, his last vision the inhumanly long barrel of her gun as she put one of the explosive rounds into his heart. She stood and leapt over his corpse, pulling herself up the wall as bullets hit concrete behind her. She leant back and fired off another three rounds at the man in the top of the stair well, who had obviously not expected her to be climbing on the walls. Red explosions marked the entry and exit wounds of the bullets, and droplets of blood sprayed across her as he toppled backwards. She licked her lips, tasting it. This _was_ fun. She jumped from the floor and landed on the corpse, still spurting blood from severed arteries. It fountained up her leg, onto the inside of the coat. She emerged into the corridor and found herself face to face with another exoskeleton. With a little growl she kicked the gun barrel, wrenching it from the mans hand. He grabbed the Jezebels barrel, forcing it upwards. The suits were strong…but the men inside were still men. She jabbed the index finger of her left hand into the crack in his elbow joint, her fingernail like a talon, tearing through flesh. He screamed and let go of her gun. She spun and delivered her best judo kick to his face, the combination of her police training and supernatural strength combining to lethal effect. The face-plate cracked and the man was flung bodily into a wall. She followed quickly with a punch that ripped through the gap between his chest plate and stomach plate, tearing into his torso with a wet ripping sound. She slowly withdrew her blood covered hand, looking with fascination at the once white glove. How the hell did Alucard always keep his clothes so spotless, even during the midst of the most bloody combat?

She threw the Jezebel from her right hand to her left as she walked down the corridor, then fired the rest of the clip off round the corner. The satisfying sound of bullets hitting flesh told her she had been successful. She walked round, seeing the shattered corpse lying against the far wall, fingers clutched round its gun. Chucking her gun back to her right hand she withdrew another clip and slid it in, pulling the slide back in her teeth as she walked up to a metal door. She fired free times, blasting apart the hinges and lock, then kicked it in. The priest was waiting for her inside. His wounds seemed to have almost healed, though he was still bloodied. He looked her up and down, and curled his lip in disgust, taking in the blood splattered across her clothing and smeared around her lips.

"Been having fun, monster?" he asked as he stepped past her, averting his eyes.

"Indeed I have." She said, pushing past him again. She fired as they came round the corner, knocking another one down the stairs. She led the regenerator down to the ground floor, watching as he stepped gingerly over the broken corpses she had left. Two more were blown apart as she strolled to the front door. Another man, unsuited, leapt at her with a silver plated combat knife. She simply decapitated him with a single backhanded sweep, the head flying back through the doorway as the body slumped to the floor. Her senses told her that he had been the last one.

"Monster…" she heard the priest mutter as she kicked out the front door.

"Just shut up and start running. I presume your people have some sort of safe house in the city?"

He just growled at her and started running off into the night. This was the kind of city where no-one would seriously think of stopping a blood-caked maniac running through the streets in the early morning.

Talking of which…

She checked her watch. Damn, it was 3AM already. Time to clean up this mess before dawn. She took a mobile phone from a pocket and dialled a number.

"Hello," said the voice on the other end, "McDougherty's carpet cleaning service. How may I help you?"

"Oh, Hello. My name is Miss Victoria, Miss Seras Victoria. I'm afraid I've had an unusually large spillage…twenty or so men are very displeased."

"I see Miss Victoria. Where was this spillage?"

"Next to pier seven, in a three storey brick building roughly twenty metres away from the water."

"I see. How bad was the spillage?"

"I think the carpet might be beyond repair."

"Understood. We'll do our best. Would you like us to move you somewhere more comfortable whilst we clean up?"

"Definitely"

She slept that day in a sun-proof room built specially for the purpose in the cellar of Hellsing's small Belfast headquarters. The coffin was uncomfortable, but she slept soundly. The few staff at the office had been nigh on terrified of her when she had walked in, up to her elbows in blood, and walked straight to the small red refrigerator outside her basement quarters where she had drunk three pints of blood, causing one person who had followed her in to have to excuse himself, probably to go vomit.

She _was_ a monster…

No, that was negative, defeatists thinking. She was what she was, she just had to make the best of it. She couldn't help her desire for blood or her lust for violence. She simply had to reign them in as best as possible and use them to the best ends she could. Had she ever killed someone through drinking their blood? No, she had requested Alucard to teach her how to hunt without killing, and to her surprise he had, one of the few decent things he'd ever done for her. Had she ever killed an unarmed or innocent human? Never, she was almost sure…she did her best to be polite and courteous to those around her, although she was starting to develop the tendency to exaggerate her vampirism just to assert control over people, like she had with those policemen. Maybe that was the first sign of her leaving her humanity behind, of her transformation into something wholly different and far less pleasant? She did not know enough…damn Alucard. Damn his doublespeak and riddles. There was so much he could have told her, so much he could have done to ease the passage between human and vampire… As she lay in the uncomfortable coffin, drifting off into a dreamless sleep, she made herself a promise.

I will _never_ let Integra go through the same doubts and uncertainties I did. Never.


	8. Mysteries and Discoveries

Seras arrived back at the Hellsing mansion at eight the next evening more than a little tired and disgruntled and not at all pleased with herself. Before removing the corpses and torching the building, a thorough search by the Hellsing officers had elicited nothing. Not a single clue to their allegiance except what could be gathered through their equipment. She had got carried away in the slaughter, she admitted to herself. That last one at least she could have probably knocked unconscious, rather than headless…

She sighed as she trudged down the basement stairs. It was done now, no use crying over spilt blood. Looking up as she walked the familiar route to her room she was surprised to see the door slightly ajar. She could feel a faint sense of almost despondency, edging across her mind. Walking more slowly, she almost crept to the door, before pushing it open.

Integra was sitting on her bed. Her jacket was off and lying on the floor nearby, and her shirt was spotted with blood. She looked abjectly miserable. Her head shot up as Seras entered the room, and she saw that her face was stained with the red streaks of vampiric tears.

"Seras…" she said in greeting. Her voice sounded small and helpless, so far removed from the commanding air of authority that she had come to know.

"What are you doing here Integra?" Asked Seras, walking slowly towards the distraught vampire. "Shouldn't you be in your office, or something?"

"I can't face them Seras, I just can't face them. Walter is running things from the Ops room…he's saying my injuries playing up again or something…Oh Seras, what did I do?"

"You made a choice, Integra." Said Seras, sitting down on the bed beside her. "A choice you can't ever unmake."

"It was a stupid choice, Seras." Said Integra, slumping against the elder vampire, "I'd be so much happier dead."

"But no-one else would be. Integra. We've been through this before. You had to survive for the good of Hellsing…"

Integra gave out a great racking sob, blood falling again from her eyes. Seras felt herself instinctively put an arm around her holding tight to her shoulder. She was so cold…

"How long have you been crying, Integra? She asked, suddenly worried for her fledgling.

"I don't know…I think I started early this morning…"

"You're really cold. Come on, you need blood. Goodness knows how much of it you've cried out…" She started to help her up, one hand on her shoulder the other steadying her at the waist.

"I don't want to drink Seras…can't I just starve…leave it all behind?"

" NO!" Said Seras, more sharply than she'd meant. She picked Integra up. She felt so light. The fledgling struggled against her grip, breaking away from her and falling across Seras' battered old armchair.

"I didn't mean for this Seras…" The older vampire looked around wildly. Where was Walter when you needed him? She couldn't leave Integra like this, not even to go and get blood for her, and the refrigerator unit that held the vampire's blood supply was in the central kitchens. She couldn't walk Integral through for a drink in front of all the kitchen staff…

"I tried to slit my wrists."

She turned to look down at the broken figure curling into the chair.

"I tried twice. It just…healed over."

"Right, come on you," she said, hauling Integra upright in the chair. She pulled her sleeve up to expose her wrist. "Drink!"

Integra stared dumbfounded at Seras' flawlessly white skin, hovering just inches away from her teeth.

"But won't that make me…" she said at last.

"No. It has to be a willing act on both sides. I won't allow it to release you."

"I don't…"

Seras sighed.

"I'm getting tired of this Integra." She said, and practically jammed her wrist into the vampire's mouth. She bit down more out of surprise than anything else, at first anyway. Then the hunger took over. Seras herself had fed well before setting out from Belfast: there was enough in her veins to share. She gave a little moan at the electric sensation of the bite, her mind racing back all those years to when Alucard had turned her. So long ago now. She felt a tingle of pleasure run up her arm as Integra sucked on the puncture wounds made by her fangs. As she felt her arm grow cold, or at least colder, she slowly withdrew it from Integra's mouth. The young vampire suckled pathetically, only letting go when Seras threatened to tug her fangs out, her tongue extending to lap at the wound even as Seras rolled down her sleeve. Integra collapsed forwards with a groan, her head resting sideways on Seras stomach.

"Why won't you let me just starve…?" She said, in a sort of pleading tone.

Seras knelt down, pushing her back into the chair as they did so, so they were looking eye to eye.

"You don't 'starve', Integra. You just become hungrier and hungrier, until it overwhelms you and you kill and drain the first living thing you come across, whether it be a stray cat or your own son."

Integra flinched slightly when she said that, a look of fleeting pain passing over her crimson eyes.

"So you see," continued Seras, "You've got to drink, if not for your sake then for others."

"I've always done things for others, Seras." Said Integra, stretching back in the chair and licking her bloodstained fangs. "Everything I've ever done has been for others." She sat straight, and looked up at Seras as she stood, the petite vampire seeming to tower over her. "Every action I've ever taken in my life has been for the institution, or the crown, or the country, or the family, or the soldiers, but never for _me_..."

Seras sat on the corner of her coffin-bed, her back resting against the hydraulic pillar.

"Well then," she said, "Why are you so upset about becoming a vampire?"

Integra looked at her blankly.

"We are, first and foremost Integra, creatures of independent will. Alucard and I are bound to Hellsing by the seals and by choice, but even within our bonds we exert a staggering amount of independence. When things are quiet we roam the night-time streets of London, socialising and feeding."

Integra looked shocked. "Feeding? But I thought…"

Seras smiled. "You know as well as I do that vampires do not have to kill when they feed, Integra. When I feel the need for warm blood, which I do sometimes, once you've had the taste of it the transfusion packs are never quite enough, I simply go into a bar, beguile some drunken young man, we end up kissing in an alleyway and bam." She slammed her fist down on her palm. "I give him a tap around the head, drink a pint of his blood, steal his wallet and then rush back into the bar screaming blue murder and saying that a mugger has attacked my prospective one night stand. Someone rushes out to help him, I have a drink to calm my nerves, then leave unobtrusively before he regains consciousness. He learns not to take strange young women home from pubs, I get a warm meal, the people in the bar get a bit of excitement, in the end, as I see it, everyone's happy, or at least no worse off."

Integra was nodding slowly. "What do you do with the money?" she asked. She knew that the salary Hellsing gave her more than paid for Seras' relatively non-extravagant taste in clothes and other such items.

"I pay it back into their bank accounts. No sense in being especially nasty to someone who stood you up for a drink, is there?" Seras laughed, and Integra smiled a bit too.

"There you go." Said Seras, "Cheer up, eh? You've quite literally got everything to live for."

"Well, sort of." Said Integra, chuckling slightly. Seras smiled ruefully and nodded. "Yeah, well, even so it isn't so bad."

Integra sighed again. "But what about my son, Seras? I love him more than anything, I took this cursed immortality to protect him, and yet…I can't be with him anymore Seras. I just can't. I was with him, talking to him about it all, the implications…and there was this little voice speaking to me all the time, dripping like sugary acid…you know the voice, don't you Seras?"

She nodded. "Was it by any chance doing something along the lines of urging you to drink every last drop of his sweet, virgin blood?"

She nodded. "Ignore it." Said Seras, simply, "I do. It gets weaker the less hungry you are. If you keep yourself well fed it isn't a problem. Goodness knows, back when I first joined, before you married your husband, I had to practically contain myself from drooling whenever you entered the room."

Integra blushed slightly, no mean feat for a vampire, even one that had just fed.

Seras laughed again before continuing. "A virgin of noble birth? Good grief…That's why it's so strong, around your son I mean. As far as his blood goes against the transfusion packs, it's like the difference between, oh, Moet et Chandon and Tesco's sparkling wine. They're basically the same thing, but you know which you'd rather be drinking." Integra nodded slowly. So that was why the urge had been so strong…her family had vintage blood. No wonder Alucard had always been trying to get his teeth round her neck.

"So…" she began slowly, "You liked the taste of my blood?" The idea that was forming in her mind, this thought, was so contrary to everything that she had ever done and believed before it scared her…yet the thought, the very idea of it, was so thrilling, so tantalising…

Seras looked at her astonished.

"Why, yes…"

"Would you like to taste it again?"

Seras eyes widened as she realised what Integra was saying. She felt herself begin to blush as well, and stood up hurriedly.

"Integra…" she began, but the other woman finished for her.

"Oh my god Seras! I'm sorry, I don't know what you must think of me…oh…" she sprang up from her chair, and backed hurriedly towards the door, her hand over her mouth. "Oh dear…forget I asked, forget…oh what must you think…" and with that she was out the door. She heard her footsteps running off down the corridor then a heavy slam that indicated she had entered her own room and shut the door with some force.

Seras sat back stunned. Had Integra really asked what she thought she'd asked? Her mind reeled as she thought about it. Could it really be that that proud virginity was the product of something other than strict protestant morals? Could Integra really…no, it was preposterous, Sir Integra Hellsing…she was married with a child for heavens sakes! _So? _Countered a voice in her mind, _Don't think you've never had any doubt about your own sexual preferences. Your virginity DEFINITELY wasn't the product of strict protestant morals, was it? Don't seem to remember you much enjoyed that time with dear old Alucard either…_ She stopped her thoughts there. She was not going to go back to dwell on that sordid little moment of her past. That had all been his doing anyway, he'd tricked her almost…_But doesn't that lend weight to the idea that_…She stopped again. She felt quite flushed. This was getting silly, she was a perfectly well adjusted young woman, as far as she was a woman, definitely not…well, a homosexual. The very idea repulsed her.

_They do say that the most ardent homophobes are the homosexuals who repress their own true feelings…_

She stood again, and flung on her coat. She would head up to ops centre, see if she was needed on any missions. Failing that, a brisk walk into the village would do her fine, yes, something to work out all this energy, blow the cobwebs away…

She closed her door behind her, and walked off down the corridor towards the stairs. Suddenly, she felt a prickly sensation on the back of her neck. She whirled round to see a familiar figure, seemingly made entirely of shadows and red suede.

"What the hell do you want?" she asked, hotly.

"My, my, police girl." He said, his voice full of deep, disturbing merriment, "You do get feisty when your blood is sufficiently roused."

"What in heavens name is that supposed to mean, Alucard?"

"Did your little fledgling make a pass at you?"

She felt herself almost quivering with rage. The elder vampire had the art of annoying people down to a tee.

"I don't know where you got that impression, Alucard. Talk about dirty old men. All those centuries must be getting to you."

He laughed properly, rich and deep "Maybe you should have accepted, Police Girl. You were always too uptight. A little fun would do you a world of good."

She snarled, and withdrew the Jezebel from inside her coat.

"If I were to blast you into dog meat, Alucard, how long would it take you to regenerate? I doubt it would be pleasant no matter how long it took. There's a lot of blessed mercury in these bullets."

His laugh rose again as he swept back into the shadows, leaving nothing put a slight chill to betray his presence. She replaced her gun in her pocket. Damn him…maybe she should go see to Integra? She could be crying again…no, better leave her to cool off. Yes, that's what was needed, just a cooling off. She had been confused, dazed, a bit punch-drunk on Seras' immortal blood…yes, it would all cool off after a bit, if she gave it some time.

Putting on her red-tinted spectacles she turned and headed off up the basement steps.

It was more of an informal gathering than a proper meeting. Integra, washed and in a fresh set of clothes, was there, sitting slightly away from Seras, as if still deeply embarrassed by what she'd said. Also present were Walter, Captain Ross, the leading human operative in the intelligence section, Captains Peters and Lestrange, commanders of companies one and two respectively, and of course Alucard, who sat at a distance to the main group around the library's big central table, looking slyly over his glasses at the two female vampires in attendance. Integra, who was of course in her human disguise, did her best to avoid his gaze, putting on a stern and implacable façade, with the help of some telepathic encouragement from Seras.

"Now, gentlemen, Seras," she said, her voice almost back up to that old standard, "Do we have any leads on the men that kidnapped the Juggler?" 'The Juggler' was Hellsing's code for father Lieberwitz, just as 'Sword Dancer' was their code for Anderson. Someone made a small movement. "Captain Ross?"

Ross stood. He was a small and impeccably neat man, seemingly unaffected by the presence of two known vampires in the room. He adjusted his little wire-framed glasses as he walked over to the projection screen.

"When we examined the corpses, we were able to extract dental x-rays from three of them, that is those that still had intact faces. Using the information from Captain Victoria, we narrowed down our search of the dental records to recent American immigrants, backtracking for twenty years without success. However, when we checked the Republic of Ireland's records, we found our match almost instantly.

Three faces appeared on the projection screen as he pressed a button. Seras had the vague memory of last seeing one of them falling backwards, his forehead exploding from a TMP round. Names and other information, seemingly photocopied from passports, appeared next to them.

"The names are almost certainly spurious. As are the dates of birth and most other data about them. They came over in a party of eighteen, claiming to be construction Engineers from the US."

"I only killed sixteen." Said Seras, "What happened to the other two?"

"As yet unknown. We've eliminated most of the dead, and we have arrest warrants out for four suspects, two of which are unidentifiable corpses, two of which are our true targets. If they didn't leave Ireland before we put the lockdown in place we should stand a decent chance of catching up with them, especially if we enlist some, er, underground help." Ross was referring to Hellsing's increasingly effective, yet technically treasonous, tactic of using the passive elements of the undead population against those most likely to cause trouble, posting information about them on certain internet bulletin boards and handing notices to the managers of certain nightclubs. Very often, they would find their potential troublemaker either dead by morning or suddenly gone underground. The mere knowledge that Hellsing knew where they were hiding out was enough to induce even the most arrogant vampire to do almost anything out of pure fear, in the hope that if they treated Hellsing well, it wouldn't destroy them. And so far, it hadn't. Hellsing had honour, even when it dealt with the undead.

"Good." Said Integra, "There's nothing more we can do there until we capture at least one of them. Walter, do you think we'll be able to get clearance to employ some 'creative data retrieval' techniques?"

"I'll get right on it, Sir Integra."

"Now, do we have any idea what these gentlemen did before coming to the British Isles, and, more importantly, who hired them and brought their equipment and to what end. You can't smuggle assault rifles and exoskeletons into somewhere like Ireland, not easily anyway. Also, where in hells name did they get depleted uranium and mercury ignition rounds from? That's specialised anti-NHB equipment, which means they knew what they were doing to some extent."

"They knew what a vampire was, and how to kill one." Said Seras, "And they had the equipment to do it…well" she grinned, "Sort of. My estimate is that they'd probably fought nothing but FREAKs before, if they're knowledge was anything but theory."

"Okay, their guns?"

Ross again. "Steyr assault rifles and Glock pistols. Frame numbers filed off. They could have been brought practically anywhere. They're ammo however, has us stumped."

He clicked a slide, to show a familiar picture, a 5.56 mm mercury ignition bullet. "These bullets have _no_ other purpose than for dealing with NHB targets. To our knowledge, they're manufactured in only four places in the world. On site here, in Black Sands Nevada, the Vatican city and in Kyoto. We're certain our stocks haven't been depleted unlawfully, as are the Vatican. We're still waiting for the Japanese and the Americans to get back to us."

"Could they have made the bullets themselves?" Asked Captain Peters, sitting forward slightly.

"That looks to be the most likely possibility. They'd need a bullet press, mercury, silver and either a priest or a quantity of holy water to bless them with. We're looking into people who have purchased unusual quantities of any of these things right now, but we need co-operation with the American agencies, and that's always troublesome." Faced with only FREAKs, the continents true vampire population being both small and passive, the American agencies stubbornly refused to believe that the undead had anything except a scientific explanation, and viewed their counterparts in Europe, Asia. Africa and South America as 'superstitious fools'. Just they wait until they encounter the true undead, thought Seras, then they'll be dancing to a different tune…

"So, unknown men, not exactly decent professional hunters, but probably instructed by some, equipped with nondescript weapons…what about the exoskeletons?"

"Modified construction models. Could have been brought anywhere."

"Okay, so, they were Americans, or at least they had American passports and American accents. Amateur hunters…and they were kidnapping a regenerator. Why?"

"Could be any number of reasons," said Alucard, causing all their heads to turn. "Number one, revenge. Lieberwitz has slaughtered countless undead over the years. Maybe a grief-stricken sire or fledgling hired these men, and they were holding him for the undead in question to exact his no doubt gruesome revenge."

"That doesn't explain the silver bullets," retorted Seras. "Maybe our vengeful hirer knew nothing of regenerators, and thought silver bullets would harm them."

"What are regenerators exactly?" asked Captain Lestrange, gingerly, "I've thought a bit about the matter, but…"  
Alucard smiled, pushing up his glasses.

"Back in the eighteenth century a Vatican scholar working for the recently made secret Iscariot Inquisition had an idea so brilliant that it was almost certainly blasphemous. If the devil creates demons like vampires and werewolves to plague man and defy God, why should not man, as God's agents on this earth, use their knowledge of science and magic to create an antithesis, a holy monster capable of fighting the undead on its own terms?

"I will not go in to the hideous experiments they performed in the name of Christ. However, eventually, after twenty painstaking years of research, they finally created the first regenerator, refining the blood of undead into a mixture that produced as many strengths and as few weaknesses as possible. They are living undead: Their hearts beat, they eat food and drink water, their bodies are warm, yet they can survive almost any injury, live without food, water or even air for an exceptionally long length of time, they are inhumanly fast and strong, and have an increased capacity for using magic. However, they still retain a few flaws, despite careful refinements by out Catholic friends. They retain a form of Lunacy, that is, they become irritable and aggressive towards the time of the full moon, and their teeth become more bestial, the canines elongating almost to fangs. They also lust for battle and bloodshed, and the thrill of the hunt. Their flaws are all minor however, when compared to the traditional weaknesses of the undead that they overcame: regenerators are not affected by holy items, silver, sunlight or fire. They can still be paralysed by a stake or other such object through the heart, and from my memories of regenerators I fought back in the nineteenth century, in the time before Sir Hellsing's dear old ancestor came into my unlife, whilst the sun may have no negative effects on them as with regards damage to the eyes or skin, they're still not particularly keen on it. That might have been got rid of since, though. The only ways to kill them are to either fully or near totally decapitate them, completely remove their hearts from their bodies, or drain all their blood. The problem with the latter method is that they do not normally bleed. Their bodies somehow retain blood until a certain level of damage has been done, when they do start to bleed. So, a regenerator can be killed by just shooting at him, but it takes hundreds and hundreds of normal bullets, and more ammunition than I carry, unless I was to aim to blow off his head. Oh, and did I mention that they are utterly immortal?" The vampire sat back with a grin.

"So gentlemen," said Integra, "Fast, strong, stripped of both major undead weaknesses and the higher powers, alive but immortal. Can you think of any reason people would not want this technology? Given the ease with which government officials and others have been bribed in the past with offers of FREAK chips or immortal blood, with all the inherent drawbacks, can you not imagine the chaos someone equipped with regenerator technology could reap? An army of immortals and a web of corruption. It would be another _Das Millennium_, only this time worse." She sat back. "Have we no clues as to who may have hired these people, who they may have been?"

"Well, until we get word back from the Americans…"

"Oh god!" Said Integra sharply, "It couldn't _be_ the Americans, could it? They use exoskeletons, don't they? And there's the fact they seemed knowledgeable about the undead yet inexperienced against true vampires. The Americans couldn't be after their own higher tier hunters, could they? We have vampires, Iscariot has regenerators, the Scandinavians use witches, the Russians can deploy a squad of half werewolves…Yet the Americans have only got men in big space-suits."

Ross seemed to give the idea some thought. "It could be…it depends how much the Americans co-operate…that should give us a clue." He thought for a bit more, "Unless, of course, they say they are co-operating whilst they feed us lies." He looked worried at these thoughts.

"Or, maybe," put forward Seras, "Someone wants to incriminate the Americans. Wouldn't they have moved Lieberwitz out of the country as soon as possible, rather than keep him there for a whole day? It doesn't make sense to me."

Integra put up her hand. "This could go on all night. What we're saying is, we don't have a clue who kidnapped the regenerator or why, but that they used what might have been American mercenaries, and they were well funded. We need those other two suspects. Tell the Ulster constabulary* to redouble their efforts." Ross nodded and headed out of the room, and the rest of the meeting slowly broke up as well, Walter heading to the ops room, Peters and Lestrange to the barracks. Soon, only the three vampires were left in the study. Seras rose first, Integra hesitating for a moment before getting up to follow her. Alucard simply sat there, smiling viciously.

"Shall I get Walter to order up a king size coffin?" he said, cruelly, as the two left together. Integra winced slightly, but Seras just kept walking straight on, only the bunching of her fists betraying her immense anger. Not just at Alucard's obscene, pig-headed comment, but at the sneaking suspicion it might just be the truth.


	9. Summoning up the Courage

Integra surveyed the conference room again. They wouldn't start arriving until the evening, but still, it paid to be prepared ahead of time. Everything seemed in order, all seats laid out properly, pitchers of iced water in positions that favoured no knight above any other. Her notes were all ready, neatly laid out. Finally, everything was settled. She flipped out a hand mirror, checking her reflection…yes, the contact lenses were still there, and her makeup was un-smudged. She looked human, just about.

Closing the mirror, she sank into the high-backed chair in which she would sit during the conference. It had been a hectic week, but an interesting one…very interesting. She reached into her pocket to bring out a cigar to chew whilst she mulled over the various happenings.

I could smoke them now, she thought, rolling the cylinder of leaves up against one fang. It's not like lung cancer is going to be a problem for me…

Maybe not though. The knights knew she had given up, that sort of slip-up could be what gave her away.

So…what had she learned this most eventful week?

A lot of things, but nothing made sense.

The first useful clue they had gathered was when officer Victoria had called on an elder vampire who lived on his own in a remote Scottish castle, where he mainly painted and drank sheep, perfectly acceptable activities as far as the Hellsing organisation was concerned. Pragmatism played a great part in the organisations decisions: Why go after 700 year-old true vampires who never hurt anyone when there were three-day old FREAKS slaughtering whole households?

Apparently men claiming to work for a water company had recently set up pumping units near a local sacred spring. They were apparently 'measuring the water level', but were actually doing nothing except pump thousands of gallons of pre-sanctified water out every day, shipping it off to somewhere far beyond the vampires area of influence.

Another interesting fact had been gathered by accident. During a raid on a FREAK nest in the London docklands a soldier had noticed a familiar logo on a crate being unloaded from a nearby ship. The ships crew were detained and the crates pried open. Napalm shells, 7.62 mm, thousand upon thousand of them. Napalm was the poor mans blessed silver, very effective against ghouls and even vampires if used in bullet form, and several orders of magnitude cheaper. They had thousands of them waiting down in the cellars in case their supplies should run low.

So, what did these two things indicate.

Someone, somewhere, was building up a stock of materials with which to fight the undead, outside of Hellsings knowledge. But who? Who had the knowledge, the money? Some independent group, funded by Rome in order to confound Hellsing's plans? Some obscure but potent cult with access to a hidden body of vampire lore? Maybe one of the elder vampires, known or unknown, intent on securing dominance over the rest of the countries undead and forming them into an army of the night?

It was maddening.

Her teeth sliced straight through the cigar stub with worrying ease as she growled in frustration, and she cursed lightly, dumping the stub in an ashtray and taking a new cigar.

She would have to remember about that. Her teeth were designed to slice through flesh with a good deal of the ease of a knife, she had to be careful with cigars. Thank goodness she had never developed any habit of chewing her own tongue or anything of the kind.

She straightened up slightly in the chair, and her eye caught a beam of weak sunlight. She hissed and sank back down. Too bright, too hot. Why couldn't she have made a clean break, acted as one dead from the start? She could have used Arthur as a puppet until he came of age, she could have avoided all this…contact lenses and pleasantries. She wanted nothing more, at that exact moment, than to abandon all the horrible, weighty chains of duty that she had built her human existence on and be with the one she, inexplicably, still loved. Even without the bonds, she loved her, though now it was a different love. Roles had been reversed. She could now look on the blonde haired vampire as something more akin to a younger sister than the absolute master and mother she had been before. Yet she was a younger sister with much to teach Integra. Now she had broken the first barriers of morality and humanity it all seemed so easy. She wanted to learn to fly, to transform her body, to speed regeneration at will, to bend men's minds to her own purpose at the merest thought.

She smiled as she imagined the knights, blank faced zombies, moving like puppets to her dark design. Satisfying. Very satisfying.

She flicked up her watch.

Still hours to wait. Maybe a nap would help pass the time, she was very tired…

_She was seven, she was skipping through the gardens of the mansion. She could see daddy on the lawn, sitting at a table, Walter bringing him tea. She stopped and waved. He waved back. She turned again and skipped off. Suddenly a strong chill ran down her spine…she felt someone was looking at her. She thought she saw an eye in a shadow. Suddenly, the afternoon light was terrifying. Every shadow laden with monsters. She turned to her father, and saw him lying across the table, dead in his newspaper. There were two puncture wounds in his neck. How come she could see them? Suddenly she realised she was next to him, looking down. She was taller, older. She reached out to touch her dead father, and she saw her hand. Long, perfectly pointed nails, white and shiny as glass. Her skin looked pale and dead, a strange grey tint on her dark flesh. She gasped. And she felt her mouth full of fangs, and the delicious taste of blood. She reached up to touch her lips, and there was blood on her fingertips. Familiar blood. It tasted almost like when she cut her lip. _

_ She looked down in horror at her fathers corpse._

_No._

_She couldn't?_

_And then the shadows of the table and the corpse lengthened, becoming solid, unfolding like origami. Eyes and teeth._

_"Excellent, daughter."__ Said Alucard. "Now we are totally free of the humans. Take my hand and we will feast on the ones who once enslaved us."_

_And with horror she found herself taking the hand, and following him into the house, into the servants quarters, the soldiers…screams, futile attempts to defend. She felt her fangs sinking endlessly into the shuddering flesh, piercing the arteries and veins, the hot blood spurting into her mouth till she could take no more, and it glutted her veins, ran out of every orifice, so she was nothing more than a cackling demon made of blood, gore trickling from her face, from between her legs, vomiting from her mouth. And still she had more. More and more and more. She had never felt so warm and full and content and happy ever. She wanted to drink all their blood, take them and possess them utterly. It felt so good, so satisfying. She wanted to drink it forever, bathe in it, revel in it, dancing naked through a rain of blood, an endless torrent of life bringing warmth and meaning to endless living death. And there, dancing with her, naked, was her love, her Seras, laughing as she smeared the carmine fluid on her smooth white limbs, embracing her, kissing her, biting her. An eternal universe of pleasure and pain and darkness and light and beauty and death, death, death, death, DEATH!_

She sat up with a jerk, breathing heavily. Her mouth tasted of blood. The memory of her dream was fresh and vivid in her mind, sharply detailed in black and felt nauseous. What on earth was she?

The sun was down, she noticed suddenly. It was night. She felt stringer, more certain. Now, the waiting must be almost up?

Surely enough, she heard the crunch of the wheels of the first car on the drive below, perfectly sharp to her inhuman senses. There was the hiss of a door, voices. It was Sir Caldwell, she could catch his nasal tone even through the armoured glass.

The conference had begun.


	10. That Fatal Kiss

Integra would have gasped, but for the circumstances. Shock kept her own lips locked tight, the elder vampire only kissing the surface, getting little more than a taste of the man Integra had just drunk from. After a few moments, she drew back, her face splitting into a broad grin.

"Well, I did it, Integra." She said, almost sheepishly, looking into the others eyes. Two crimson circles in the darkness, perfect mirror images.

Too shocked for words, Integra merely clasped her arms around her master and returned the kiss, this time with passion.

Seras awoke from sleep with a yawn. She lay there for almost a minute before she came to a startling realisation. She was naked. That was unusual, the cellar was a cold place, even if you were undead. She normally wore a night dress at least when she clambered into her coffin…wait a second.

_This was not her coffin._

It was the wrong shape, for a start. She could see that stretching out her arms and legs. A bit too narrow, a bit too long. And the lining felt different too. Final confirmation was gained when she reached out for the control panel, and found none.

The thought crept up on her. _Whose coffin doesn't have…_then she started to remember yesterday.

Good grief, had she really?

She reached up and pushed at the lid. It lifted and slid off easily, falling to the floor with a thump. Seras could now clearly see that she was indeed naked, and lying in the white satin of a rosewood coffin, a thin blanket tangled around her legs. There were little spots and streaks of blood everywhere on the lining, the blanket, the pillow, even her skin. She could hear the sound of a shower running somewhere nearby.

Slowly, she sat up. Yes, it was indeed Integra's room. The memories of the previous day were becoming clearer and clearer. Had it really involved that much biting?

She looked at the bloodstained coffin. It did seem like it, didn't it?

The sound of the shower ceased, and she turned her head to the curtain that separated off the bathroom from the main sleeping area. The curtain twitched and Integra walked through, naked except for a towel round her waist, drying her long hair. Seras blushed as violently as her undead body was able, and began to look away before realising that she too was naked. She stopped, and she smiled, apologetically, at Integra. Her memories of last night were becoming yet clearer. She remembered she had seen what was under that towel. Integra smiled too.

"You're up? That's good. Walter left us breakfast." She pointed to the table, where two places had been laid. The open ice bucket contained two packets of blood.

Seras' eyebrows raised. "Walter!" she said in shock, "Oh dear, what on earth must he think of us…"  
"Very little bad," said Integra, seating herself at the table and taking her blood pack, "Apparently, he's suspected that I might be…you know, for quite some time. He was just too polite to ever mention it. He's a man of the world, Walter." She poured the blood into the bowl, "Intuitive, and I suppose nothing shocks him after all the things he's seen. He fought in the war at the age of only fourteen, did you know?" she began to pour.

"Yes, I remember him telling me…" said Seras, looking around slowly. "Er, Integra, do you have any idea where my clothes are?"

"Over there." Said Integra, pointing to where both of their clothes lay dumped unceremoniously in a heap, "You removed them in quite a hurry as I remember."

Seras stood, self consciously taking the blanket with her, though she realised there was little point. She dropped it, and padded over to the pile of clothing, slowly shaking her head.

"What on earth came over us last night, Integra?" She said, bending down to fish through the pile for her underwear.

Integra shrugged, slurping noisily at a spoonful of blood. "Who knows, Seras? Something to do with being vampires, probably. Some urge or something…All I know about…us, really, is how to kill…us. " She still seemed slightly uncomfortable coming to terms with being a vampire, "I have no idea about…well, mating, I suppose you'd call it…" she looked back down to her meal, seemingly embarrassed at the concept.

Seras wasn't going to mention it, but when she thought about it, it had been a lot like what happened when her bloodlust took over in battle…only, well, with obvious differences.

"That wasn't something I'd normally do…you know?" She said, haltingly.

Integra nodded. "I know. I wouldn't dream of doing that normally either…" she smirked, "I mean, it was only our first date." They both giggled slightly at that. "But, well, I suppose both of us were, you know, a bit starved of sex before…we just lost control, to put it bluntly. Let our desires get the better of us."

Seras nodded, fumbling with her bra strap. It seemed to have been bent open with some force, and she had to use a not inconsiderable measure of her undead strength to re-close it.

"Yes…" she said, trailing off as she pulled on her t-shirt. She was starting to smell the blood Integra was drinking. She hadn't quite realised how hungry she was…she half-hopped across the room to the extra chair that had been drawn up, pulling her trousers on as she went. Taking her own blood pack, she filled her bowl and began to drink. After maybe fifteen seconds of quiet, slow slurping from both of them, Seras spoke up again.

"It wasn't…What I mean is…" she faltered. How to say it? Integra looked up at her confusedly, licking a spot of blood from her lip in a way Seras found ridiculously endearing.

"Wasn't too bad, really." She trailed off, uncertainly, and drunk another spoonful.

"You certainly seemed to think it was pretty good at the time," said Integra, raising one eyebrow. Seras really did blush this time, the blood she was drinking helping. She slurped noisily to try and drown out another giggle from Integra before responding. "An opinion which you doubtless shared judging by the…well, to put it frankly, the noises you were making. Quite loud noises, at some points."

"I was not!" Said Integra, indignant. "Your overactive imagination is playing up, oh No Life Queen." She said it in a sort of mock air of pomposity that almost made Seras collapse into her meal with laughter. As it was she spluttered, an affect that looked worryingly like someone bursting an artery, given what she was consuming.

"Good grief, Integra…" she said, wiping her mouth, then she laughed again. "I cannot believe what we did last night!" she said, wiping a red tear of mirth from one eye.

"Can't believe you did what?" Came a deep basso voice from off to one side of the room. Alucard materialised, sans hat and sunglasses for the moment, a sly and worrying smile creasing his porcelain features.

"Alucard," Said Integra, suddenly cold, "I thought you were raised an aristocrat. Didn't they teach you not to sneak up on ladies whilst they were in a state of undress?"

Alucard chuckled "It was fifteenth century Walachia, not nineteenth century London. They taught me to take whatever woman I wanted to my bed, provided she wasn't married. Strict Orthodox church." He laughed dryly, walking over to the open coffin. "My, my," he said, examining the bloodstains, "Things must have been lively last night. No wonder Walter sent me out on that mission…"

Seras spun in her chair.

"It's not what you think, Alucard…"

"Oh really?" he said, rounding on her, a bemused expression on his face, "I thought you'd just had some sort of slumber party and all this blood was the result of a messy mid-day snack. Obviously I'll have to fall back to the far less likely conclusion you were just engaged in rampant animalistic sex with Integra here."

"Get the hell out of my room, Alucard." Said Integra, snarling.

"But Sir Integra, aren't your quarters upstairs?" He snickered. "Oh, but of course not, Sir Integra. You're a vampire now, you have to sleep in the dungeon, and it gets so cold in the dungeon. Even the touch of another corpse is a comfort beyond words…"

"Alucard, you bastard, I swear…" Integra trailed off, unable to think up any threat or curse adequate to express what she felt.

" Despite all your high and moral pretences, what I said was true Integra." He continued, smiling, "Eh, Police Girl?" she looked away, her face twisted in rage, "I told you what would happen, but oh no, how could two paragons of saintly virtue such as yourselves even contemplate such a thing?" he grinned smugly at them.

They were silent. Undercurrents of hate and anger filled the room.

"Why do you despise poor old Alucard?" he said, with mock hurt, as he took a seat on the half-open coffin. "You should be pitying me. I have no lover to keep me company in my casket." He hooded his eyebrows in Integra's direction. "Tell me, Police Girl, is she as good as I'd imagined?"

He waited a moment for an answer. None came.

"Ah well, I suppose I'll have to keep exercising my imagination." He stood again.

"What the hell is your problem, Alucard?" Asked Seras, keeping a firm grip in the edge of the table, which was starting to splinter under the enormous pressure.

"I'm bitter, Seras." Said Alucard with total candour. "You have stolen the one object of my affections away from me, simultaneously removing my only other chance for female companionship from the Mansion. My romantic prospects for the next few decades are, quite frankly, none. The fact that you two will almost certainly spend a good deal of that time smooching and whatnot," he waved a hand vaguely, although they all had quite a good idea of what that 'whatnot' implied, "Only serves to deepen the wound." He sighed. "Don't worry though. I'll get over it. Maybe turn another young woman while you're not looking." He laughed, a bit more warmly. "Knowing my luck you'd end up living in a collective. Ah well, you'll at least compensate by sending me on more missions, for an old flame, eh Integra?" She slowly raised one eyebrow. He laughed again, walking towards the door as he took his sunglasses from an inside pocket. "Oh well, I have all eternity to get used to the idea. I'll chalk you up next to Mina*." He stopped next to the door, his face still set in a damned idiotic grin. "Maybe I should try and strike something up with Walter, that sort of thing seems to be the fashion nowadays." He put his hand on the door-handle. "Or maybe not. He's far too wrinkly. See you love birds later." With that he opened the door and melted into the shadows of the corridor, leaving the portal to swing too behind him.

Seras looked at Integra.

"He was joking about Walter, right?"

"Almost certainly," said Integra, running her finger round the inside of the bowl to pick up the leftovers. "Although it's not something I'd like to think about. Incidentally, you remember what he said about using his imagination, you don't suppose…" she made a suggestive hand gesture.

Seras eyes widened, "Now that is a disturbing thought."

And with that, the two went back to their breakfast.

Integra sat at her desk, leafing through reports. She felt a lot better now…it seemed that the instability of her transformation had left off. She had something in her life now, or more exactly someone, to keep her stable. So far, Walter and Alucard were the only two who knew about her and Seras'…relationship. She couldn't wait till she could drop that one on her husband…although the impact such a thing would have on Arthur…she sighed. She had thought life was complicated. Death was so much worse.

Her desk phone began to ring, its trill tone almost painful to her enhanced senses. She quickly picked it up, pressing the receive call button as she did so.

"Sit Integra Hellsing." She said, formally.

"Sir Integra," It was Walter. "We have an interesting development on the Irish front. I thought you'd better know."

Integra sat up a bit straighter, if that was possible.

"Report, Walter."

"You aren't going to like this, Sir Integra. About an hour ago, a police launch in Dublin bay spotted something in the water. Upon investigation, it turned out to be a corpse, impaled through the heart with a Union Jack**. Another was quickly spotted, and retrieved as well. We can't be absolutely certain, but judging by photographs of the corpses they would seem to be our two missing Americans."

Integra's brow creased. Impaled through the heart…oh no.

"Walter, you don't think they could be back, do you? _Das Millennium?_"

"This does bear resemblance to the way the Valentine Brothers disposed of that MI5 agent, I will admit. However, there is one interesting thing."

"What?"

"The cause of death seems to have been a gunshot to the head, rather than the blood being drunk. But of course, being in the water would have drained the corpses of blood anyway. We'll be able to tell fully when we ourselves are able to examine the bodies for signs of partial ghoul transformation. I'm working on acquiring them as we speak."

"Excellent as always, Walter. What kind of gun were they shot with?"

"A 9mm handgun of some sort. Again, water damage makes exact ballistics impossible."

She held the phone slack for a moment to lift her glasses and pinch the bridge of her nose, careful not to apply enough pressure to splinter the bone, something she was now probably capable of.

"Walter, what is the likelihood of this all being a _Das Millennium_ resurgence?"

She heard the old man pause for a moment before answering, collecting his thoughts.

"Almost none, Sir Integra. We disposed of all of _Das Millennium's_ leaders and accounted for all the FREAKs in the main kampf gruppe. There may still be remnant organisations, such as the Valentine Brothers crime syndicate, left. However, it is odd we had not seen any signs of them before…"

"Not necessarily Walter. I want you to go back over every major FREAK related incident since the destruction of the group. Look for any signs that there might have been _Das Millennium _involvement. Nazi symbols, methodology, anything. If they are back, I want to know about it."

"At least we are pretty certain there has been no resurgence in FREAK chip production."

"Indeed. Are you sure our own samples and files on the technology have not been tampered with?"

"They were checked over a few weeks ago".  
"Have them checked over again, Walter. Better to be safe. Meanwhile, sort through our files on known 'harmless' undead. Get into contact with some of them, and see if they've heard anything. They sometimes pick up things we…" She paused for a moment. She had been going to say 'mortals' but had thought better of it. "and MI5 don't notice."

"I'll get someone on it. Might need to requisition Seras from active duty though. Some of the elder ones haven't quite worked out telephones yet. We'd use Alucard but most undead seem to find his personality particularly…abrasive." _Tell me about it_, she thought bitterly.

"Very well. Put Alucard on the missions roster. You might consider sending him out a bit more, by the way. He's been getting restless." Might as well humour the lifeless bastard.

"Of course, Sir Integra. Do you want the autopsy reports on the two we found?"

"Yes, send them up."

"Very well, Sir Integra." And with that, he put the phone down. She replace her receiver, and sat back in the chair, her eyes closed. Damn. Could those damned Nazis really be on the comeback _again_? No, they had destroyed them too thoroughly…Damn, this got more complicated every second. First the Americans, then the Letzt Battalion…who next? The IRA? The Martians? Why did this have to happen now, of all times? All she wanted to do was get used to being dead and keep Hellsing running smoothly till Arthur could take over. She didn't need something like this.

She could only hope the curious incidents would end here...

She sighed, and removed a cigar from the packet, clamping it between her predator's teeth.

She knew that whatever was happening, this was far from the end. This was only the beginning.

*Read Dracula. Now!

**Just in case it's not common knowledge in other countries, the British flag is called the Union Jack.


	11. The Plot Thickens

The Hellsing mansion's library was large but close. Heavy, old furniture, pungent with impregnated cigar smoke, was scattered around amid shelf after shelf and stack after stack of books. For the most part they were old, leather bound. The core of the collection had belonged to Integra's great-great-grandfather, Professor Abram Van Helsing, which he had later anglicised to Abraham Hellsing. She looked at them now, wondering what the distinguished occultist would think, were he to see his descendant, a member of the ranks of the living dead, standing amid his collection of books. The same thing all her ancestors would think, probably: traitor. But, she was slowly realising, she no longer cared. She had done it because it had to be done. There was no going back.

She smiled slightly. No, never any going back.

She turned to where Seras sat on an ancient, worn sofa, leafing slowly through an old romantic novel that Integra believed had belonged to her mother. She walked over slowly and sat down next to the elder vampire, attempting to read over her shoulder. Seras squirmed slightly, then closed the book.

"Is it any good?" asked Integra

"No idea," replied Seras, nonchalantly, putting the book down and turning to her fledgling. "What do you want?"

"Seras…" she said slowly, "I want to know something…I remember you mentioning, once, that you'd slept with Alucard…Why?"

Seras looked away from her, down at the floor, silent.

"I mean," continued Integra, "I always thought your relationship was more…I don't know, father and daughter, almost. He never seemed interested in you…" She trailed off.

Seras smiled slightly. "Not whilst I was a fledgling. When I was in the transitional phase, like you are now, Alucard saw me as weak, a coward. He simply cannot understand a mental attitude that would lead one to reject power, despite that powers cost. I think he would do anything for a bit more strength, or speed, or magic. Anyway, whilst I still refused to willingly accept his proffered blood, he looked on me as little more than a wayward child…when I became a No Life Queen, however, well, lets just say his views changed. It was just after you'd married your husband…he came into my room. I thought he was depressed, though he could have been faking it…It's just I've never seen him depressed before, it was so…odd. He wasn't even grinning. I've seen him grin while he gets ripped in two. He looked like a dog who'd just been kicked…I didn't know what to do with him. I thought later it might have all been a trick…I could never be quite sure. He's quite a manipulator. Anyway…he ended up finding comfort in my arms, and I must say that, trickery or no, once he got into it he was most…enthusiastic." She smiled, sadly, "I hated it though…it was the night I lost my virginity…I felt so violated." She sighed.

"I know exactly what you mean" Said Integra, slowly nodding.

"Talking of which"…said Seras, laying the book on a small table and sitting back, to face across from her fledgling, one arm along the back of the sofa and the other resting on the arm, "how's your family, Integra?"

She looked away, slightly. "I've been avoiding them…Julian seems to be taking things rather well, I must say…I dare say young miss Mackenzie from the typing pool is helping him in his extremity."

"The bastard…" murmured Seras.

"Indeed," Said Integra, "But a justified one, at least in his own view. He's too much of a religious man too have ever cheated on me when I was human, though I know I left his libido drastically unsatisfied. But no, as far as he can see, marriage vows are fulfilled. I'm dead, we're parted, time for a new flame. He seems to have overlooked sex out of marriage, but well, that's just like him."

Seras laughed. "It's not like we could ever do it _in_ marriage…" she said, smiling at Integra.

"And anyway," continued Integra, "When you're damned already…" she sighed.

"Don't think like that!" Said Seras. "I don't think it's automatic. If we protect the innocent and do the sacred task appointed to Hellsing, how can we be said to be servants of evil? We don't tear out children's throats or write blasphemous messages in their blood. We dispatch those that do, how can that be evil?" she smiled encouragingly at the glum looking vampire, "and besides, it's not like we even ever have to find out what happens after you die, not for a very long time yet, anyway. Come on, cheer up…"

Integra smiled slightly, and moved closer to Seras. "One night at a time, eh?"

"Precisely!"

"Well then, my current problems are simple, I suppose. I still have to rule Hellsing, I still have to ensure my son is a good successor, and, if I'm allowed to think ahead, I must plan how I am to disappear and then re-appear as a vampire…I suppose it would be too obvious if I were to keep my mortal name, wouldn't it…"

"What a great opportunity!" Said Seras, smiling happily, "You can choose whatever name you want, personalise yourself." She giggled. "So, any thoughts?"

"Oh, I don't know…" Integra frowned slightly, "I was thinking possibly Laura."

"Laura? Isn't that what Buvanci called herself?"

"Yes…but I wouldn't call myself Laura for that reason…It would be for the same sort of reason Buvanci herself chose the name."

"Oh, and what was that?"

"Laura is a character in the story 'Carmilla' by Le Fanu. She's a sweet, innocent young girl, the daughter of an Austrian nobleman, who falls under the homo-erotic predation of the beautiful golden haired vampiress Carmilla."

Seras thought over that for a moment, then her brow creased in mock anger. "And just what are you implying, dearest?" She said that last word with a mocking tone. Integra laughed. "Absolutely nothing, Draculina."

"Oh! You know how much I hate that diminutive…even if it's technically accurate…"

"Yes well, I thought Mina a tad too obvious…"

"You're being very wicked, Integra." Said Seras, frowning, a slight grin playing across her face. "Do you know what happens to wicked little vampires?"

"Not exactly, but I can't wait to find out…"

Alucard looked at the piece of paper. There were four little black and white photographs printed on it with ink, some working of this 'computer' Walter seemed to have been enthusing about since the mid-seventies. What was wrong with a type-writer, or even pen and ink, he couldn't see. He must be getting stuck in his ways…he hadn't updated his mode of dress for years, and his speech was still touched with the archaic…damn Van Helsing for locking him in that cellar. It was amazing what forty years away from society could do to ones sense of fashion.

So, he was looking for these four FREAKS, and Walter wanted them alive? More trouble than it was worth…oh well, here it goes.

Alucard was not one for subtlety, not when he was on the job and there were FREAKS about, and the club whose iron door he had just kicked twenty feet into the middle of the crowded dance floor was chock-full of the maggots, and the rest were ghouls or potential prey. Scanning the packed room with every sense at his disposal, which came to far more than the regular five, he began to fire at those FREAKS he had not been sent to capture. Silver bullets connected with chests and skulls, Alucard's mind drawing subconscious patterns from the lines of tracers and the sprays of decomposing gore that splattered from his victims. The humans were screaming, some of the FREAKS too, even as the first turned to dust. There was a hiss behind him, and he flipped the Jackal over his shoulder, putting a round into the face of the leaping FREAK who had been about to tear open his back. He crossed his arms over, firing left and right, clearing out doorways. The Jackal clicked empty and he ejected the magazine, reaching one handed into his jacket for another clip as he shot back at the encroaching hoards with the Casul.

He saw one of his targets. The FREAK had a gun in his hand. Alucard fired a single bullet from the newly reloaded Jackal that tore off the top of the trash vampire's gun and his shoulder to boot, throwing his severed arm across the room. He screamed in pain and tried to run, only to lose a knee. Satisfied he wasn't going anywhere, Alucard turned, seeing two more of his targets. They were quicker than him. One opened up with a machine gun, the bullets smashing into him like a blizzard of hot steel, tearing at his clothing and flesh. He cackled nastily as he felt the stinging pain. Excellent…two more bullets removed the arms from one of the FREAKS, and he dropped to the floor, screaming. The other, a young woman, turned to run. Alucard quickly shot the leg off a table next to him and hurled the splintered piece of wood at her, piercing her through the heart. She gasped and sank to the floor, paralysed by the stake…that just left one more…the main dance floor was empty now, everyone either dead or fleeing…he strode across the room to a door, kicked it down, along down a corridor, his fist and boots smashing in door after door. He eventually discovered the last one, or at least the dust that remained of him, sitting in a chair in a small office. There was a gun lying across the table. Alucard spat at the thought of how weak a creature he must have been to be able to commit suicide, and turned from the room to where Hellsing troops in the main room were already rounding up his 'captives'.

Alucard sneered and shook his head as he walked out and off into the night. Too short, not enough of a challenge. They were no fun these FREAKS…Almost as bad as humans, and their blood tasted foul…he needed a proper challenge. Oh well, for the moment, anything would do to take his mind off the disaster he had made of his love-life, through no fault of his own. It seemed that he was cursed in more ways than one. He chuckled at this thought. Yes…all of god's creation turns against poor old Alucard.

He grinned. And who the hell was winning, eh?

Walter sighed. Nothing. Nothing at all. Still silent after all these years. Even when they had been told that Hellsing knew all about Das Millennium, even when they had been shown photographs of the scientists who _must_ have planted the chips in their bodies, still they refused to speak. Maybe the chips did that, maybe it was some psychological conditioning…they would kill themselves to try and avoid capture, and even if they were captured, they would say nothing. These four were special because they were original FREAKS, chipped, rather than those cursed by FREAK blood. But they were as useless as all the others Hellsing had captured. Each one was now just a pile of dust and a silver chip in a jar, shot cleanly through the heart with silver bullets. But where did that leave the investigation? All the suspects were dead, all the leads were dead, the only clue they had pointed to an organisation annihilated years ago. And the knights conference was in less than two weeks. He would have to put something together for Integra to present to them. All he could hope for now was that the various adverts and phone calls he'd sent out to get in touch with the neutral inhuman underground would be listened to. They had to find out what was going on in the country, and fast. Meanwhile he had young Arthur to cope with…the child suspected his father was sleeping with his secretary, yet he still couldn't understand about his mother…wise beyond his years and yet still blinded by love. What an odd world this was.


	12. Tea for Two

Integra shuffled the last of the papers together and sighed. At about this time, she would have normally rung Walter for a tray of sandwiches and some tea. Perhaps…no. Having blood brought up to the office was simply too risky. If one of the troops or secretarial staff were to happen to burst in...she knew how fast things spread in an organisation such as this. There had been rumours that she was a vampire long before she actually was one. But these rumours had never been taken seriously, like the rumours about her sexuality…goodness, if the troops were to discover the truth.

She chuckled. Maybe she could still try some tea? Seras kept going on at her about how she could still enjoy liquid refreshment, but she had never felt inclined, really…what the hell?

She pressed the button on her desk that summoned Walter, and leaned back in her chair, massaging the back of one icy hand with the other.

The knock that indicated Walter's arrival was prompt, as normal.

"Come in Walter," she said, leaning forwards again to adopt a more official posture.

Walter entered, his usual light smile on his face.

"Yes, Sir Integra?"

"Bring me a pot of tea, Walter."

"For two, if that's not any trouble," came a voice from behind Walter. He stepped aside to let Seras move past him.

"I'd like to share a pot with my fledgling, if that's alright by the both of you?"

Integra smiled.

"Tea for two, Walter."

Seras sat herself down in an armchair off to one side of Integra's desk and smiled sweetly.

"What's all this about Seras," asked Integra curiously. Seras merely put a finger to her lips.

"It's important, I'll talk after Walter's come and gone."

Walter returned promptly with the tea and set it on Integra's desk.

"Thank you, Walter," she said, "Could you see that we are not disturbed?"

"Of course, Sir Integra," said the Butler, stepping back through the door. "I'll be certain to."

He turned, closing the huge oak door softly behind him, leaving the two vampires alone.

"So, Seras…" Integra began, pouring herself a cup. "What is it?"

"It's a very important matter, Integra," said Seras, as she took the pot to pour herself some, "It's about our bond…and when it should be cut."

Integra set her cup down. "Cut?" she said, a edge of worry creeping into her voice.

"It won't affect our relationship!" Said Seras, quickly, "Well…that's a lie, but it will make us more equal…in a way…"

She was floundering. Oh hell…this wasn't holding water at all, was it? They were equal now, both bound to serve the other…if one of those bonds were to be shattered, that would leave the other in a dominant position, the male role of the relationship, if you will.

Integra thought as much herself.

"Is it…that you don't like being my master?" She said slowly, possibly injecting just a little more emotion than she actually felt.

Seras practically squeaked. "No! Well, it's just you see…It's a part of the hole thing really, of truly becoming a vampire…you're still only three-quarters of the way there."

Integra cocked her head. "Three quarters…I was aware of the difference between fledgling and true vampire, what are the other two 'grades'?"

Seras looked a bit uncomfortable. "Alucard explained it to me once. When someone has just been bitten, they are hardly a vampire at all. Their body is weak, barely animated, hungry. This is the first stage…if a vampire remains in this stage without feeding, it will begin to revert to a ghoulish state, eventually losing its sanity and becoming one of those shambling abominations. You were in this stage for barely half a minute Integra, because the next step is drinking blood, any blood. The third stage, the last you passed, is drinking blood from a living human. The fourth stage will be for you to drink my willingly offered blood, cutting yourself loose and becoming a no-life queen….It's all down to drinking blood, really. That's why it's so important, why I forced you through the first stage particularly…if you were to remain starving yourself, your hunger would have overtaken you and you would have become little more than a mindless feeding machine."

"Being cruel to be kind," said Integra, blowing icy breath onto her tea before taking a sip.

"Well, not cruel exactly," said Seras, smiling. "Drinking blood isn't exactly the worst thing in the world for a vampire, is it?"

Integra shook her head slowly, and sipped again.

"Well, there you go…but, it's important, when you go through the last stage. I held myself back for a long time…I should have become a No Life Queen in the police mortuary the night we fought Anderson, but, well, I chickened out. And I suffered for it later. A No Life Queen wouldn't have been so harmed by Incognito's magic, for one thing…and even though you're not exactly front-line, you should really be at your best."

She reached over and squeezed Integra's gloved hand in her own. "It's the best thing for you, really."

Integra smiled, clasped Seras' hand in hers, feeling the cold limb warm slightly as Seras forced the blood within her veins to flow and burn slightly, flushing her skin pink, but draining her reserves of energy somewhat. It could hardly be fun for her. Suddenly, Integra realised why she loved Seras. Selflessness, a sort of air of common sense and decency, of general niceness seemed to pervade the air around the vampire. The older soldiers, who had come to know her, had all remarked on it during her regular 'chats' with them, which she used to keep an eye on goings on in the ranks. Seras was far too nice to be a vampire. She seemed to defy every stereotype, never killing, returning her victim's money, wearing pastel shades. No-one had ever told Seras that vampires should not wear pink. Despite what she was, what she did, out of everyone that was a member of Hellsing, she seemed the most untainted, the most free. Her opposite, she who had never known anything else but the grim Victorian mansion, lessons in the occult, free time at the shooting range…she embodied everything that Integra had ever wanted to be, she realised as she caught Seras blood red eyes with her own. Alucard had meant her to make Integra jealous, to make her angry…but what had he done instead? Shown her that there were some things darkness could not corrupt, and given the former virgin of steel her first true lover, an exemplar to look up to, as master, vampire and woman.

And what of Seras? It would perhaps of surprised Integra to know that her feelings were mirrored in the blond vampiress. She admired, envied even, Integra's enormous strength of will that could survive seemingly any trauma, any destruction, and come through rebuilt on the other side. She never gave up, and that had inspired Seras, both when she had been Seras' commander and now. Integra would take on anything and win, would never despair no matter what. She would fight, lie, kill, even mutilate herself to achieve her mission, her goal. Admirable ruthlessness. Seras had been forced to acquire a measure of this quality, otherwise her job was impossible. Those with bite marks, even the whimpering little girl, her arm mauled by a ghoul, crying out for her mother, could not be allowed to live. A few times, she had actually been unable to do it, and the soldiers had marvelled at the demon that wept tears of blood at the death of innocents.

Integra, she knew, would never have hesitated. No matter the damage to her mind and soul, she would have done what needed to be done. This was someone Seras could respect, could cling to as the authority figure her life had lacked since her freeing from Alucard's bonds. Seras was not a leader in any major sense. She could tell soldiers how to enter a building, but not which building to attack. She needed someone above her, a curious position for a vampire, cutting against her natural instinct to rise to the 'top of the food chain' or what you will. Integra was that someone. Alucard had been ok, in some ways…but you had to love your leader, and she had never really loved Alucard, only the false love created by the bond. Once that was broken, she saw his insanity, the mile-wide flaws in his arrogant personality. Integra, as far as she could see, had no flaws. Iron will in a body that could bend iron bars. Perfection embodied, her love.

She stared back at Integra. _Please Integra, put yourself on top again…I can't stand the responsibility of being your parent anymore…_ Integra cleared her throat. "I suppose then that it must be done. When?"

Seras grinned. "Tonight, if you want! Alucard insisted on a full moon, but in some ways he's a hopeless romantic…did you know he has his own copy of Dracula?"

Integra's smile broadened. "I brought it for him myself, as a joke…I hadn't counted for his vanity."

They both laughed a bit at this. Seras finished her tea.

"Do you think there'll be a mission tonight," asked Seras, looking at the grandfather clock against one wall, "It's eleven thirty."

"You know as well as I do, Seras, that most things come in before or just after midnight…I think one o'clock, maybe?"

"I think we should have some more tea," said Seras, reaching for the pot. "Then, we can, well, retire, I suppose is the nicest way of putting it." She giggled slightly.

"Is that the promise I think it is," asked Integra, leaning forward across the desk and smiling.

"You bet, honey," said Seras, leaning forward to kiss Integra on the lips, "You bet."


	13. No Life Queen

The door to the room opened and Seras stepped through, beckoning behind her for Integra to follow. She stepped, smiling slightly, across the threshold, and stood facing Seras, looking down at her from her superior height.

Seras reached up and brushed her cheek lightly.

"So…tonight you wish to become a full vampire, eh?"

Integra nodded, feeling the rough cotton of the glove against her smooth cheek.

"A last kiss first?"

"Hardly the last, Seras." Said Integra, as she leaned forward, "Hardly the last."

Vampires are, predominantly, dead. They have very few vital fluids left, apart of course from the blood they imbibe regularly. They cry blood, their weak urine is tainted with it, as is their saliva. Thus, when Seras and Integra kissed fully, what they tasted was each others blood. They pulled together as instinct did its best to take over, their cold lips pressed together, long tongues eagerly exploring each others mouths, trying to get as much as possible. Then, slowly, they withdrew, Seras practically levering the younger vampire from her. They looked at each other again. Seras grinned and licked a pink smear of bloody saliva from her lip.

"How long has it been since you fed, Integra?" She asked.

"Four or five hours."

"Too long. You'll need all your strength for the transformation. I'll go grab some."

Seras rushed out the room and headed along the corridor, up the stairs and into the kitchens where the refrigerator for the blood was kept. Throwing up the lid she grabbed about ten packets, getting stares from everyone else in the room at the time, cooks and a few soldiers grabbing a bite to eat. All of them, however, were wiser than to question what would seem to be a _very_ hungry vampire.

She clattered down the dungeon steps and along the corridor, finally bursting into her room and dropping the blood packets heavily on the table.

She looked up, and saw Integra. She had unbuttoned her shirt and was lying on the coffin-bed, arms behind her back, a small smile playing across her lips.

Seras smiled too.

Integra smiled. "For the last time master, feed me."

Seras picked up a blood packet and walked slowly over. If breath had still been a necessity, she would have been breathing fast. Slowly tearing the top from the blood packet she sat down on the bed next to Integra and placed the tab between her lips. Integra closed her eyes as she drank the blood, the packet quickly crinkling up as it drained.

"Another?"

Integra nodded, and Seras reached out, willing a blood packet to her. One flew from the pile on the table, blurring across the room to her gloved hand.

"That's a neat trick." Said Integra, gazing at the packet. "Will I be able to do that?"

Seras grinned. "One day, Integra, you and I will both be as powerful as Alucard."

"That day is hundreds of years into the future, Seras."

"Hundreds of years spent with no-one but you for company…Somehow, I can live with that."

Integra smiled again, plucking the blood pack from Seras grasp.

"No you can't"

Seras grinned, "I can die with it then…every night."

She leant down and kissed Integra again, reaching out for the controls to the coffin lid as she did so. The heavy wooden and metal cover slid slowly into place as the two lovers embraced, sealing them into a darkness that was no concealment to their dead eyes. Every monochrome detail was as crisp as starlight as they kissed.

Pale, strong hands moved surely in the shadows, caressing cold flesh as they divested each other of their clothes. Tongues and lips met furiously, tasting blood.

"Now, Integra…" Seras leant back and up as far as the coffin would allow her, baring her neck, "Now, I offer my blood to you, willingly. Take it and be free!"

Integra seemed to hold back for a second, then she moved with viper speed in the darkness, sharp white teeth meeting in the bared skin of Seras' throat, flushed with blood that the vampiress was deliberately pushing through her veins. She sucked with all her might, intoxicated on the immortal blood of her master, feeling it drip down her throat like a liquid orgasm. Seras moaned softly as Integra worked her fangs into the wound, trying to get as much as she could, reason destroyed by bloodlust. Suddenly, she felt shuddering hands push her back into the velvet bottom of the coffin. Before she knew what was happening, Seras mouth was once more over hers, her long tongue licking at the blood that coated Integra's teeth. She felt her mind clearing of bloodlust as Seras' body moved against hers, the electric sensation of cold skin upon cold skin shooting through every part of her. The tongue withdrew, and her lips were free once again…and with them, suddenly, something else was gone. The removal of Seras body from hers was accompanied by the removal of something far deeper inside her than even the most adventurous appendage could dare go. The bond was gone. As it had come in an instant, so it departed, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, Integra felt free. Free of everything, free of life, free of death, free of Seras, free of Hellsing. Now she knew why Alucard and Seras grinned all the time. Now she knew why vampires basked under the light of moon and star and soared in the night-time air on bat wings. They were animals, predators, hunters, utterly free. She gasped as the realisation struck her with the force of a thousand sledgehammers.

"Wow, I didn't know I was _that_ good…" murmured Seras, a silly grin on her face.

"I haven't…" began Integra, only to be silenced by a hand laid across her pale lips.

"I know exactly why you just cried out, Integra…don't think that the breaking of the bond stops me reading your mind." She withdrew the hand.

"Doesn't it? Then you can read my mind right now?"

Seras eyes widened, as did her grin.

"As you wish…_master_" She said, her hand creeping down to rest across another pair of lips.

Integra's smile was a shark's grin in the blackness of the coffin.

"I never thought I'd be as glad to hear that word again…" she said, brushing the back of one hand across Seras' well-proportioned breasts. "I think, for now, I shall be happy with a simple search and destroy." She lunged forward again, and Seras reciprocated into her. Ivory teeth flashed in a slick drift of red, coating silken skin and velvet coffin lining, guiding serpent tongues in complex paths across each others bodies as they writhed, two of the dead engaged in a mockery of the most essential act of life, every second heaping blasphemy upon blasphemy. Yet, they would argue, how can love be unholy? Was their passion not proof that even within their bloodthirsty souls good still dwelt? Was not their love proof that God's love was manifest even in this seemingly profane act? As the slow fuse of orgasm burned down in the darkness, and the boundaries between human and monster were lost in a frenzy of biting and kissing, such metaphysical things, it must be said, could not be farther from the lover's minds.


	14. Strands of a Rope to Hang You By

Integra surveyed the conference room again. They wouldn't start arriving until the evening, but still, it paid to be prepared ahead of time. Everything seemed in order, all seats laid out properly, pitchers of iced water in positions that favoured no knight above any other. Her notes were all ready, neatly laid out. Finally, everything was settled. She flipped out a hand mirror, checking her reflection…yes, the contact lenses were still there, and her makeup was un-smudged. She looked human, just about.

Closing the mirror, she sank into the high-backed chair in which she would sit during the conference. It had been a hectic week, but an interesting one…very interesting. She reached into her pocket to bring out a cigar to chew whilst she mulled over the various happenings.

I could smoke them now, she thought, rolling the cylinder of leaves up against one fang. It's not like lung cancer is going to be a problem for me…

Maybe not though. The knights knew she had given up, that sort of slip-up could be what gave her away.

So…what had she learned this most eventful week?

A lot of things, but nothing made sense.

The first useful clue they had gathered was when officer Victoria had called on an elder vampire who lived on his own in a remote Scottish castle, where he mainly painted and drank sheep, perfectly acceptable activities as far as the Hellsing organisation was concerned. Pragmatism played a great part in the organisations decisions: Why go after 700 year-old true vampires who never hurt anyone when there were three-day old FREAKS slaughtering whole households?

Apparently men claiming to work for a water company had recently set up pumping units near a local sacred spring. They were apparently 'measuring the water level', but were actually doing nothing except pump thousands of gallons of pre-sanctified water out every day, shipping it off to somewhere far beyond the vampires area of influence.

Another interesting fact had been gathered by accident. During a raid on a FREAK nest in the London docklands a soldier had noticed a familiar logo on a crate being unloaded from a nearby ship. The ships crew were detained and the crates pried open. Napalm shells, 7.62 mm, thousand upon thousand of them. Napalm was the poor mans blessed silver, very effective against ghouls and even vampires if used in bullet form, and several orders of magnitude cheaper. They had thousands of them waiting down in the cellars in case their supplies should run low.

So, what did these two things indicate.

Someone, somewhere, was building up a stock of materials with which to fight the undead, outside of Hellsings knowledge. But who? Who had the knowledge, the money? Some independent group, funded by Rome in order to confound Hellsing's plans? Some obscure but potent cult with access to a hidden body of vampire lore? Maybe one of the elder vampires, known or unknown, intent on securing dominance over the rest of the countries undead and forming them into an army of the night?

It was maddening.

Her teeth sliced straight through the cigar stub with worrying ease as she growled in frustration, and she cursed lightly, dumping the stub in an ashtray and taking a new cigar.

She would have to remember about that. Her teeth were designed to slice through flesh with a good deal of the ease of a knife, she had to be careful with cigars. Thank goodness she had never developed any habit of chewing her own tongue or anything of the kind.

She straightened up slightly in the chair, and her eye caught a beam of weak sunlight. She hissed and sank back down. Too bright, too hot. Why couldn't she have made a clean break, acted as one dead from the start? She could have used Arthur as a puppet until he came of age, she could have avoided all this…contact lenses and pleasantries. She wanted nothing more, at that exact moment, than to abandon all the horrible, weighty chains of duty that she had built her human existence on and be with the one she, inexplicably, still loved. Even without the bonds, she loved her, though now it was a different love. Roles had been reversed. She could now look on the blonde haired vampire as something more akin to a younger sister than the absolute master and mother she had been before. Yet she was a younger sister with much to teach Integra. Now she had broken the first barriers of morality and humanity it all seemed so easy. She wanted to learn to fly, to transform her body, to speed regeneration at will, to bend men's minds to her own purpose at the merest thought.

She smiled as she imagined the knights, blank faced zombies, moving like puppets to her dark design. Satisfying. Very satisfying.

She flicked up her watch.

Still hours to wait. Maybe a nap would help pass the time, she was very tired…

_She was seven, she was skipping through the gardens of the mansion. She could see daddy on the lawn, sitting at a table, Walter bringing him tea. She stopped and waved. He waved back. She turned again and skipped off. Suddenly a strong chill ran down her spine…she felt someone was looking at her. She thought she saw an eye in a shadow. Suddenly, the afternoon light was terrifying. Every shadow laden with monsters. She turned to her father, and saw him lying across the table, dead in his newspaper. There were two puncture wounds in his neck. How come she could see them? Suddenly she realised she was next to him, looking down. She was taller, older. She reached out to touch her dead father, and she saw her hand. Long, perfectly pointed nails, white and shiny as glass. Her skin looked pale and dead, a strange grey tint on her dark flesh. She gasped. And she felt her mouth full of fangs, and the delicious taste of blood. She reached up to touch her lips, and there was blood on her fingertips. Familiar blood. It tasted almost like when she cut her lip. _

_ She looked down in horror at her fathers corpse._

_No._

_She couldn't?_

_And then the shadows of the table and the corpse lengthened, becoming solid, unfolding like origami. Eyes and teeth._

_"Excellent, daughter."__ Said Alucard. "Now we are totally free of the humans. Take my hand and we will feast on the ones who once enslaved us."_

_And with horror she found herself taking the hand, and following him into the house, into the servants quarters, the soldiers…screams, futile attempts to defend. She felt her fangs sinking endlessly into the shuddering flesh, piercing the arteries and veins, the hot blood spurting into her mouth till she could take no more, and it glutted her veins, ran out of every orifice, so she was nothing more than a cackling demon made of blood, gore trickling from her face, from between her legs, vomiting from her mouth. And still she had more. More and more and more. She had never felt so warm and full and content and happy ever. She wanted to drink all their blood, take them and possess them utterly. It felt so good, so satisfying. She wanted to drink it forever, bathe in it, revel in it, dancing naked through a rain of blood, an endless torrent of life bringing warmth and meaning to endless living death. And there, dancing with her, naked, was her love, her Seras, laughing as she smeared the carmine fluid on her smooth white limbs, embracing her, kissing her, biting her. An eternal universe of pleasure and pain and darkness and light and beauty and death, death, death, death, DEATH!_

She sat up with a jerk, breathing heavily. Her mouth tasted of blood. The memory of her dream was fresh and vivid in her mind, sharply detailed in black and felt nauseous. What on earth was she?

The sun was down, she noticed suddenly. It was night. She felt stringer, more certain. Now, the waiting must be almost up?

Surely enough, she heard the crunch of the wheels of the first car on the drive below, perfectly sharp to her inhuman senses. There was the hiss of a door, voices. It was Sir Caldwell, she could catch his nasal tone even through the armoured glass.

The conference had begun.


	15. Unpleasant Revelations

"Sir Hellsing" The stout man bowed decorously, a slight and indecipherable grin on his face.

"Sir Ferris, welcome" She bowed herself, stiffly as befitted an invalid, rather than one who could bend her limbs into almost any devilish contortion she wished.

"So glad to see you making such a quick recovery from your injuries, after all, none of us getting any younger, eh?"

She nodded slowly, barely suppressing a smile. It was true, but in a way the knight couldn't possibly imagine.  
"That's all of us then!" Said Sir Makepeace, shuffling his papers slightly. "Now, we can get to business."

Sir Ferris moved quickly to his seat and sat down, exchanging some small pleasantries with the two knights on either side of him, as Makepeace coughed busily yet ineffectually. When silence had finally been achieved, Makepeace, who, as the royal liaison, was chairing the meeting, looked down at his papers and read out the first article of business. Arms sales to some North African country, Integra paid little attention as Hellsing wasn't involved in this. She let her mind wander to other things, pleasant thoughts of her childhood, of Seras and their unlimited future together. The same for the second article of discussion. To the third article she had to contribute a few occasional interjections, as they were discussing the metropolitan police authority, and that infringed on Hellsing's area of authority at points. It was the fourth article for which she had been waiting.

"Now, Sir Hellsing, article 4, this worrying series of unsolved incidents seemingly relating to some kind of illicit counter-undead activity…"

"You refer to the kidnapping of the Vatican regenerator, the _Das Millennium_ copycat murders and the discovery of the stash of anti-undead weaponry?"

"I do indeed, Sir Integra. What do you make of these…incidents?"

She gave a sigh and carefully folded her notes down on the table.

"To be quite honest, Sir Makepeace, neither I nor the investigation department of my organisation have any idea whatsoever. Every course of investigation we have tried to follow has led us to yet another blank wall. We know someone, possibly American, almost certainly _using_ Americans, kidnapped a regenerator, for what purpose we know not, though we suspect the plan was to extract regenerator blood in a bid to gain immortality. We know someone killed the only two of these mercenaries not disposed of by our agents in a manner that mimicked the way in which the Das Millennium agents known as 'The Valentine Brothers' once disposed of one of MI5's undercover agents, and finally we know that at least one, possibly more clandestine groups have been gathering together undead-hunting materials inside the British isles. That is all. These incidents stand separate and isolated. FREAK targets captured by our agents and bought in for inquisition have, as normal, revealed nothing and been added to our extensive collection of remains. And that's all I have gentlemen. No new leads, no new facts. A few of my intelligence officers have come up with plausible theories, all wildly differing of course, and all based purely on circumstantial information. Nothing solid."

She paused, letting her eyes sweep around the knights. The expressions on their faces were calculatedly unreadable, and her mental powers were not powerful enough to pierce those masks of flesh. She did think she could smell something though, a vague wafting of pheromones. What was it…anxiety? Well, no wonder, the knights were cautious men, and well knew the kind of things that could lead on from strange happenings like this. None of them wanted zeppelins in the sky over Big Ben again, she was sure…

"I was hoping, gentlemen" she concluded, "That you might have some more information gathered by your various departments to add to the mystery?"

There was silence. The room was still except for a few nervous glances thrown here and there. Integra tried to follow them…there was something going on here, something she couldn't follow…

Makepeace slowly stood up.

"I think I can make this mystery clear, Integra." He said, in an odd, flat kind of voice. Integra looked at him quizzically as he put his hand into an inside pocket, then drew back startled as he bought forth the deadly black shape of an antique service-issue revolver and pointed it straight at her forehead.

"Sir Makepeace! Have you lost your mind…!?"

"Quiet, Sir Hellsing!" his voice had an icy edge to it now. "Before you die, I think I, we, at least owe you an explanation, so listen carefully. It's the last thing you'll hear before the gunshots."

"Traitor…" she murmured angrily under her breath, fixing him with a deadly glare. Her anger was rising inside her like boiling water, filling her brain with noise and bubbles so she could scarcely hear herself think. She was sure she could see the skin on Makepeace's neck twitch as his blood flowed through the veins and arteries just beneath the surface.

"Sir Murray, are both of Hellsings infernal pets away on mission?"

"Yes, Sir Makepeace. Our agents have created two separate events at opposite ends of the country. By the time either of them can return the rituals will be complete and Arthur Hellsing will control the seals."

"And we will control Arthur Hellsing." Said Makepeace with an air of unassailable certainty, turning back to Integra. "You are a disappointment to the knights, Integra. Don't think we aren't aware of the kind of corners your organisation cuts in its dealing with the undead. Pet vampires were bad enough, but we've also uncovered information of the other activities you have engaged in. Allowing certain undead freedom in exchange for information or co-operation." He slammed his fist down. "That is an unacceptable betrayal of the mission Hellsing was created to fulfil!"

"Makepeace, Hellsing could not hope to destroy every vampire in Britain, let alone the world, even if we had whole armies of troops and all the time in the world. It's a hard enough task merely to silence the newer and more aggressive vampires…"

"Silence, sir Hellsing! Your pathetic excuses mean nothing to me. Your job is not meant to be easy, nor are you meant to _fail _in such a way. We went to the royal liaisons office of course, but they would hear nothing of it. You are the darling of the Queen, the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. They care _NOTHING_ for the protestant ideals and morals this organisation was designed to safeguard!" He spat viciously to one side, and then continued to speak, pulling back the hammer on his revolver with his thumb as he did so.

"You are about to have a relapse, Integra. A blood clot in the brain, an artery suddenly rupturing under the pressure…don't worry, our private doctors will think of something whilst they're busy dressing your corpse for an open-casket funeral. Control of Hellsing will pass to your son by blood, Arthur Hellsing. And Arthur Hellsing will be ours. Your husband Julian has disappeared whilst on a business trip, visiting his mistress truth be told, and he will not be heard from again, I assure you. It looks suspicious, true, but the entire forces of the British intelligence service should be able to work something out. And if anyone in your organisation gets too inquisitive?" He shrugged. "There are plenty of spaces left in Hellsing's graveyard, Sir Hellsing, even once we have erected your glittering, marble clad mausoleum…Goodnight, sir Hellsing."

He fired once. The bullet struck Integra high in the left chest, smashing a rib and driving deep into her lung. Amazingly, however, there was no pain. The lead bullet smashing into her and the splinters of bone being hammered through her organs were little more than a tactile sensation. She looked down amazed, tasting the delicious trickle of immortal blood that was beginning to dribble from her lips.

Another bullet struck her in the forehead, smashing her glasses and throwing the bent frames and shards of bloodstained glass across the table as she was smacked back into her chair. A third smashed into her stomach, knocking her over with a gasp, a smile hitting her lips at the strange tickling sensation of the bullet mangling her intestines. Her hair fell across her face as she hit the table, a veil of crimson and silver as three more bullets struck her in the shoulder, neck and back, emptying the drum on Makepeace' weapon. She slumped, her anger clouded mind attempting to work out how its body had just received so much damage without getting hurt.

"That's her disposed of" She heard Makepeace saying, "Now, you, Sir Blakely, we must retrieve her son and perform the ritual. Use force if necessary, but he must be alive and conscious."

What!? They were going to hurt her son!? That was it! Those cursed traitors, those scum, those filthy, verminous mortal filth, had shot her, broken her glasses, betrayed the queen and now they were going to hurt her son? She let out a low growl of pure rage as she twisted her head, snapping the broken neck vertebrae forcibly back together and rising slowly to her feet, her blurry vision swimming, the taste of her own blood filling her mouth.

She heard a scream of pure terror. Sir Mackenzie. Always a coward. She caught a whiff of human urine mixed in with the delicious smell of blood filling her nostrils, which dilated as she hissed and raised one foot, stepping zombie-like up onto the table as the room was filled with cries of shock and terror.

"Oh dear god!" Screamed someone "She's one of them, a Midian!"

She could see sir Makepeace blurrily, fumbling with something in his hands. His revolver probably, trying to load more bullets. What use? Bullets couldn't hurt her! Nothing these stupid little insects made could hurt her now. She was beyond them, beyond life and death, a beautiful and terrible queen of darkness, and she was going to feast on them all. But him first.

"You traitor" She hissed under her breath "You filthy traitor. You thought you could kill me, didn't you, you arrogant little piece of shit!" She kicked a glass of water into a thousand shards of needling crystal as she stalked across the conference table towards him. "That's what you are Makepeace, and soon I'll be scraping you off my shoes just like I scrape shit off them, right after I drain you dry…"

He clamped the gun back together and fired wildly. Another bullet struck her thigh, causing her to stumble, and two went wild, then the gun clicked empty. She staggered forward, regained her balanced and arched up unnaturally before launching herself the remaining distance across the room, Makepeace's throbbing, stringy throat expanding to fill her entire world as her teeth met in his flesh.


	16. Supreme Judgement

It was all really rather a mess.

The Queen shook her head and sat back, sighing. If only the public assumption that she was a mere figurehead monarch were true. Life would be much easier if all she had to do was wave out of windows.

She looked over the report again, wincing. Nine knights dead, three more seriously injured, two more in jail, Integra Hellsing straight jacketed and bound with silver chains awaiting a trial, conspiracies and secret armies bursting out of every seam in the covert order of the round table. This was like the Judas incident over again but worse. Much worse.

So many decisions. Who would she replace the knights with? None of them would ever resume office again. Even the few exonerated of direct guilt could never be entirely trusted again. And then there was Integra. What to do with her? Her position was unique. She had killed (indeed, in some cases more like eaten) at least nine of the highest officers in the realm (Sir Galsworthy was still touch and go), yet at the same time had stopped and uncovered what amounted to high treason against the crown and the British establishment. Ordinarily, the measures taken would be justifiable, death was too good for traitors…

She looked over the medical reports again. "Cause of Death: Massive trauma to the arteries of the neck coupled with massive blood loss".

The question was, could she ever be trusted again? Was the beast out now forever, or could it still be contained. And who did she have to advise her? Her chief expert on the undead was the one in the armour-plated dungeon in the secret catacombs below the tower.

She sighed and shakily removed her reading glasses, pinching her nose as she sank back into her lushly upholstered chair. This was all too much for a woman of her age…

It was Seras who had burst in first, with Alucard less than half a minute behind. The room had been so soaked in blood that she had taken a second to suppress her instincts before assessing the situation. Integra had her teeth sunk into the neck of one of the knights, who was sprawled on his back across the central conference table. She looked like a zombie. She was riddled with bullets and covered in blood, both her own and others that had either sprayed over here or poured from her own wounds even as she had drunk it. She was in the grip of berserk madness, eyes glazed and steeped in shadow. The room was loud with screams. One man without an arm was propped against a blood-smeared window screaming, others were more intact, or even uninjured. One had even made it out the door as Seras opened it, sprinting down the corridor as if pursued by the hounds of hell, before Hellsing gaurds caught him. They had not even known anything was amiss in the soundproofed armoured room.

She knew what had happened. She had felt Integra's anger, and instantly known something was amiss when the first bullet entered her. She had disappeared from the side of the mission team with little more than a terse notice that she "had to be back at the mansion" Dissolving as bats into the night air and tearing blindly across the sky without thought of any secrecy regulations.

Lunging across the floor, she had grabbed her off the already drained corpse and pinned her down to the table. It took every ounce of strength and will she had. Integra's veins were saturated with fresh blood. Her flesh was on fire, flushed with heat and life, and even with all her wounds she was incredibly strong, even by supernatural standards. Seras was crying out for the gaurds even as she pinned her thrashing limbs to the table. They rushed the room two by two, guns at their shoulders. Anyone else might have been shocked at the sight of devilish slaughter presented within, but not Hellsing officers. The situation was assessed immediately. Some men rushed to train their weapons on Integra, others to contain and bring medical aid to the remaining knights. Two withdrew their pistols, laden with blessed silver, and began shooting the corpses that had been feasted upon. Some twitched or gave slight gasps, indicating that the ghoul-transformation process had already begun.

"Essence of garlic!" Screamed Seras, "We need to subdue her!"

A gloved hand holding a syringe was suddenly at Integra's held upper arm. The needle went in and the fluid was shot into her. Suddenly the arm went limp, then quickly the rest of her body subsided as she was sent numb. The traditional housewife's remedy was powerless against all but the weakest of vampires and ghouls in any natural form, but the essences of garlic flowers injected straight into the vampires bloodstream had the power to produce extreme lethargy, bordering on paralysis. Seras saw another drop of blood running down the pale, relaxed face and, with shock, realised she was crying.

This court was seldom used. It shouldn't even have really existed anymore, but here it was. A small, snug room, oak panelled, with a pattern of a star inlaid in delicate tile on the centre of the floor, naming this place: The Star Chamber. The Highest court in the land, in past ages a byword for royal corruption, where King James Stuart had tried his opponents on false claims, and where his son Charles had ruled the country after he abolished parliament. Supposedly torn down by the Lord Protector, the court had been resurrected in secret after the reformation, with an authority equivalent to the crown court in the granting of death sentences, and used for centuries to try the countries secret enemies: spies, papists, wizards, and now, a vampire. It had last been opened for the Judas, and now it sat in judgement on the one he had betrayed.

She was lead in straight-jacketed, bound with silver coated chromium chains and silver buckled straps, muzzled like a movie serial killer. Eight soldiers surrounded her in perfect step at a distance of two metres, guns full of blessed mercury bullets trained for any movement. They lead her to a chair that stood in the centre of the star. She obeyed them calmly, allowing herself to be chained and strapped in before the soldiers slowly withdrew, guns always trained. When they were off the central floor a measure of protection installed in the seventeenth century started up. With a low whine the edges of the star blazed in a bright blue pentagram, random patterns at the edges of tiles suddenly becoming arcane characters. Tetra. Gram. Maton. The name of God, A classic warding charm. The tension on Integra's face was visible as the arcane power of white magic locked her in place.

The sole judge, the Queen herself, sat half shadowed on a high dais. There was no Jury, though there was an executioner, should he be needed.

"Integra Hellsing," the Queen began "You are guilty of crimes against the state, with certain mitigating circumstances. This court does not decide guilt. This court decides upon degrees of punishment. Before judgement is passed upon you, you may make any pleas for mercy that you may wish."

Integra drew herself up to look at the Queens blurred outline. She had not been allowed glasses.

"I have nothing to say. I am entirely responsible for what I did. I bow down to the judgement of your Majesty in the tradition of aristocratic rule."

The Queen smiled, imperceptibly, and cleared her throat before continuing.

"This is a very difficult position you put me in Integra. I have had so many factors to weigh up. Your past record, the justifiability of your crimes, if not your methods, the politics…I have not slept easy this past week, Integra. Should you die, or should you live? That has been by dilemma, I will not lie. Normally I would have been forced to have you 'put down' as it were, but I feel that this would not be a correct course. You have served me faithfully for almost thirty years now Integra: unstinting and unturnable, against everything that this world and the next could throw at you. You have passed through death itself for me, turned aside from the certain hope of Salvation for the good of Queen and country. That is not a sacrifice to be taken lightly Integra. So here is what I have decide to do."

The Queen paused. The silence was a tangible thing. Only Integra and the Queen and the gaurds were hear. No recording secretary, no clerks of court. No clack of recording devices, no scratching of pens.

"You are to both die and not die, Integra" The Queen continued "As of this day forward, official documentation shall reflect reality, for once. Integra Hellsing is now, officially dead. With the tragic passing of your Husband, Arthur Hellsing is the sole beneficiary of your estate and the heir to the title. He is now Sir Arthur Hellsing the second, a knight of the most ancient order of the Round Table. You are no one, nameless."

Integra hung her head, looking solemn. Her title...her position…

"But that is not the end of your service, nameless one. Never think that. Where you were once the master, you now return as the servant. Under what name shall you labour away your eternal existence for the crown?"

Integra looked up. Her eyes were surprisingly strong, defiant almost, and proud. Always proud.

"Laura."

"And for a surname?"

Then Integra did the most amazing thing. She smiled. "Will 'Harker' be acceptable, your Majesty?"

The queen smiled too.

"Harker will be most acceptable, Integra. Most acceptable indeed."


	17. She Who Laughs Last

It is an unusual privilege to attend your own funeral.

The coffin was, of course, empty. Weighed down with sandbags, or something else. It lay in a double grave, alongside the casket containing her husband, which was unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you looked at it, very full. With information gathered from both the survivors of the massacre of the knights and documentation recovered in raids (It is amazing how incurably officious some can be, keeping even records that could serve only to damn them) it had not been too hard to locate the shallow grave to which his corpse had been buried, next to the corpse of his mistress. It had been a messy job, but quick. A silenced sub-machine gun whilst they lay in post coital slumber, then simply rolled up in the bloodied bed-sheets and driven out to a bit of industrial wasteland in North London. Quick but efficient. The room they had been in showed only the barest forensic evidence.

The priest finished his hollow words, and the first earth was dumped on top of the flowers. No mausoleum to commemorate Sir Integra Hellsing. She had been allowed that. No such glorious monument to her eternal damnation and shame. A simple stone. Names, dates, rest in peace. Maybe it should have said 'no rest for the wicked'?

She felt horrible, out here under the strong, spring sunshine. It seemed to shine straight through her, through her clothes and flesh, making her feel both light and fragile as glass, and yet immensely heavy. She felt like she should be sweating, but no sweat came, just itching that crawled all over her skin. The sunglasses she wore diminished the light to only just above the intensity at which humans viewed it. Despite feeding a mere hour before, weakness and hunger gnawed at her insides like cancer.

All this physical discomfort, however, was nothing compared to the mental anguish she was experiencing as she watched her son mourning her death. For him, there had been yet another lie. In his world, she had been put down by Hellsing officers acting under the Queens direct orders, the coffins weight her ashes mixed with salt and silver dust. Of course, a new vampire officer would be needed to take her place, for the psychological wellbeing of Seras if nothing else. She was out looking for a suitable candidate at this moment, and after a few months grace, she would find her. She would be Laura Harker, a lesbian trainee army officer with a fascination for the occult, about Integra's height, much younger, of fairer complexion, with short dark brown hair. (Hellsing's progressive alchemy department had some terrifying serums waiting for her). Seras would wile her, seduce her, transform her. The documents were already drawn up. Laura would die in a training accident (no-one would speak up for an investigation of course: the girl was an orphan of two only children, alone in the world, disowned by religious foster parents over her sexuality) and then Nosferatu Harker would be born. The power of the government was, in Integra's mind, far more arcane and potent than vampiric magic. They could kill and create people at will, erase others entirely from the annals of history, and all from the safety of an office in Whitehall. She had seen Laura Harker. Read the intricate details of her tragic past, and her gothic future. A potent combination of altered records and the inherent fallibility and suggestibility of the human mind. A person existing only as a name, grafted onto the bleak tale of a mother who had died in childbirth and a father who had descended into drug taking and death as a result: a name slipped into birth registers, hospital records, vaccination data, adoption lists, school registers, examination tables and a hundred other documents: and yet, Seras was sure that, confronted with such hard evidence and a vague description, there would be teachers, classmates, doctors, dentists, driving instructors and all the other countless ancillary personages on which every normal modern life infringes that would remember this statistical ghost. Some would probably even swear to the face, painstakingly reconstructed backwards by computer technicians, especially once it had been seamlessly grafted on to school, team and army photographs. Her task from now was to assume the manner and personality of this artificial being completely. There could be no recognition from anyone. Not even her own son.

The mourners filed away. She watched her son leave, shepherded by bodyguards to the family Rolls-Royce. When all had gone, she stepped forward quietly from the shadows where she had observed the proceedings, supposed behind her veil by all to be some distant cousin or Hellsing official. She gave a nod to the gravedigger, who nodded back gravely, manner befitting profession, as she laid a single dark red rose atop a bouquet of garish yellow flowers, sent in false triumphal victory from the Vatican.

Integra Hellsing may have been dead, but she would always have the last laugh.

THE END


End file.
